23 Ways You’re Really Living in the Chinese Century

It was Ma Qianzhou Not satisfied with Chinese progress. He was an engineer at a large state-owned company, and he belonged to a generation that grew up believing that engineering was destiny, and that China’s future would be built by people like him. Then Ma discovered something unusual: a wormhole dating back to the late Ming Dynasty. With over 500 of his peers, he commandeers a ship and travels back in time 400 years to a pre-industrial China ravaged by foreign invasion and internal decline. Their mission: to launch an industrial revolution in the past that will make modern China great (again) in the future.

This, strictly speaking, did not happen. It’s a conspiracy Morning Star in Lingao (临高启明), a sprawling, collectively written sci-fi web novel that has consumed a corner of the Chinese internet for nearly two decades. It now totals millions of words. It has never been translated into English. Almost no one in the West knows it exists. Read more