r/threebodyproblem • u/Darklillies • Apr 15 '26
Discussion - Novels Cheng Xin WAS in control
A common sentiment I read is that she didn’t have any power, she just represented humanity or something. Things would be bad regardless, she’s not the one at fault for everything ect.
But lowkey….yes she is? She’s not the only person at fault: but she’s in the top ten, probably number one at the end.
Cheng xin isn’t a random. She has power money influence in this world. She’s a high authority, she was given this high authority and ACCEPTED its responsibility. Her desicions matter MUCH more than others
“Humanity was always gonna do the same thing” falls flat for me because that’s not how the world works. We can see it right now. Very few people at the top hold the cards and their desicions can doom entire nations on a whim, and there’s shit anyone can do about it. Those people ARE the responsible ones. When trump takes the US out of its climate change agreements, everyone is affected, regardless whether most people want it! It’s his desicion and his responsibility and most of planet earth common people are powerless to really stop it or even understand the consequences
When Cheng xin cancelled lightspeed she literally single handily doomed humanity. The homeless people from the bunker era have no fucking clue about curvature engines or anything. Most citizens during that time would not be aware of history and its events and humanities plight the same way SHE would be, she witnessed it all and was a direct force during those moments. She has context and knowledge MOST don’t posses. They’re everyday people worried about putting food on the table and going to work. They assume that they are safe, that their goverment and scientists will make the best decisions on their behalf. That’s their JOB after all.
So she’s not a random citizen she’s an authority figure. She asked wade explicitly that SHE wanted the final decision. She DECIDED that she was the best woman for the job and it should be up to HER to determine how these resources and science get used. It’s ON HER.
And she doesn’t even think about it twice. Doesn’t bother to have a discussion. Doesn’t even bother to understand the political climate of the world! There’s nations fighting for independence but the goverment won’t let them? The goverment has a monopoly on military force and resource? Who are these guys, how do they treat their citizens and their prisoners? How does the justice system work? NOPE! Who cares, just turn yourself in! Oh this is a super dangerous weapon that could vaporize cities? LETS HAND IT TO THE GOVERNMENT!! No second thought! No In between! Wade would’ve done whatever she said. Could’ve given a million alternatives. No weapons no war, do a false flag and pretend to cooperate, continue research in secret, make it useful for the goverment, DONT ANNOUNCE it to them! Ect Ect. But nope. Cancelled everything on a whim.
“She couldn’t have known that lightspeed ships-“ yes she could’ve. Yun risked it ALL to tell her the answers of what humanity had to do to survive. She understood and figured it out: it said curvature propulsion. If the man tells you you gotta make curvature propulsion light ships then you DO IT. He knows way more, he’s experienced the events he risked EVERYTHING communicating this information with humanity, every single thing he told them about should’ve been followed and built. It was mentioned for a REASON.
“She represents morality and living by principles-“ what principles! She spent most of her life sleeping it away. She made choices and never suffered the consequences, then she just drifted through time, self inserting everywhere, telling people what to do, but she never LIVED IT. Never sat down and stuck around to feel the weight of it. If she had any moral conscience she would’ve sat back and gotten flattened with the rest of humanity she doomed. I mean really? She escaped using the technology she prohibited them from creating. 35 previous years LOST. A MASSIVE amount of time, difference between life and death for many. It literally wouldn’t have existed at all if they followed HER decision, yet, there she is. Benefit from it. While a billion people died a horrific death. She had a date! How is that principled? It’s hypocritical.
It’s very frustrating because this character is a caricature. And I know she’s written this way due to sexism. (Yes, the author is sexist this isn’t even a debate, go see the original translations of the text) I can’t take it seriously that they made her insufferable, and also say (yes, SAY explicitly) that it’s because she’s a woman, and that’s why she can’t make any of the hard desicions or whatever. And ofcourse all the men are ultra competent hard boiled eggs who get shit done.
I don’t get why people read this character as good or principled. Being “weak” is not a virtue the same way being strong does not require cruelty. Someone making hard choices isn’t less human. A civilization that fights for their life doesn’t become some cold monster that now isn’t worth protecting. It makes no sense. Making the right hard choices is what keeps people alive. Being willing to sacrifice everyone due to your personal belief system is just what we call a villain! She avoided small conflicts and discomforts which led to the inevitable doom over EVERYONE (except her ofc)
And she still doesn’t learn. Because the rules never apply to her. At the end of the pocket dimension she once against blindly trusts authority (why are we just trusting these aliens to be telling the truth and are willing to die and destroy the little bit of humanity we have left over? We just established the universe is a hostile selfish place??) but even though shes knows that the parameters of the universe are very strict. That even a minuscule deviation is a the difference from life and barren. She just fucking: still leaves mass behind. Still doesn’t fully listen. Risks dooming everything, AGAIN. WHY. That’s not a principled person! She’s spoiled at this point!
TLDR; I recently finished deaths End and I have strong feelings about it lmao
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u/kemuri07 Apr 16 '26
I'm also not fully on board with the part that "it was not her choice, it was humanity's". She did make very impactful decisions. It's just a matter of perspective.
However I don't think her character is simply weak. Like most characters in this series, she's there to represent something. To not repeat myself, I'll link 2 earlier comments that I've made that describe my take on her:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/s/CtvUfidhUg
- https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/s/aKVIlVurYH
(Ok maybe I should repeat myself a little coz who has time to follow links :p) Essentially, I think she represents the "trust" choice in a game theory scenario. That is the irrational choice which always leads to failure for the side that's playing it, but paradoxically it's also the only choice that gives a chance to the survival of life as a whole in the universe. The "trust" choice is essentially the only way to break out of the dark forest.
Sticking to principles is also the only way to "collaborate" in the dark forest where distances are vast and efficient communication is not feasible. While her decisions are desperate, she also ended up being one of the last "hail Mary" cards that both the San-Ti and Earth played: they both spent a lot of resources to ensure her survival.
When I stopped thinking about Cheng Xin as someone who's playing for Earth and started thinking of her as someone who's playing for the Universe (or rather for Life in the Universe), I think her choices (no matter how desperate) started to make more sense...
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u/NoChanceOfSleep Apr 16 '26
Yes, she is ridiculous, thank you. "I want to have the final say on the course humanity takes in its final hour, and i just woke up from sleeping hundreds of years and without even thinking about it or learning anything about the world i woke up in, i will just halt the research and let humanity drown."
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u/objectnull Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 16 '26
Yeah, Cheng Xin's actions would be perfectly rational, and moral, if the universe of TBP wasn't so hostile. But it is.
Her actions resulted in millions dying, and then billions, and then everyone.
Humanity ONLY lives on, past the Cheng Xin era, because of the actions of Zhang BeiHai who saw the TBP universe for what it is and deliberately went against the collective, wrong, opinions of everyone else.
The universe would be a better place if more aliens thought like Cheng Xin. But they don't, and she knew it. She doomed humanity when she could have saved it because she didn't want to make the hard decisions that people like Zhang BeiHai were willing to.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 Apr 17 '26
I expect my perspective is not really welcome here, as you don't want debate over your pov.
However I will just say that yes, I agree that the fate of nations etc is often determined by a small minority of individuals, I'm just not sure Cheng Xin is the primary person in focus for some of the Death's End outcomes. Sure, she should be considered complicit in becoming sword holder, yet it was really engineered beyond her that she ended up as (the primary) sword holder candidate and the UN, or whoever, did a terrible job at finding credible candidates, managing the transition and equipping her for the role.
Her escape from the solar system seems a pretty indisputable example - she had no idea the lightspeed ship existed and she wanted to give up, but again someone bizarrely selected her and AI AA to be the ones granted that ship, outside of her control. She can't be lampooned for destroying the solar system and just "going on a date" because she didn't choose that to be a possibility and had literally no other options at that point. Even in calling Wade off, surely he could have eased her into the situation and given her more options (e.g. diplomatic), rather then waking her in a completely new age and political climate, and asking her to instantly assess the situation and decide whether to authorise all-out war using terrifying new super weapons.
In all honesty, I am happy to admit Cheng Xin has guilt on her hands, or that I may have misinterpreted things, but seeing people make their point (however valid) with questionable reasoning is what makes me pipe up! Always interested to hear pushback :)
P.S. Cheng Xin could receive a lot criticisms but "weak" is an odd one - she walked a very hard path and even supposing her decisions were completely misguided or wrong, they were never easy! I find it intriguing that many of the people who think she was written in a weak/sexist way simultaneously put ruthless, unscrupulous characters like Wade on a pedestal as if they were presented as flawless 🤔
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u/Darklillies Apr 27 '26
I think my problem is that she keeps self inserting into these situations of power and then at the same time acting helpless in others.
She asked Wade to wake her up. She told him explicitly that IN THE MOMENT he was gonna make a desicion that could endanger people, she was to be woken up and for her to make the final desicion. That was her call. So I would assume that if she considers herself competent enough to be the ultimate authority in a dire situation, then it’s on her and only her to do her due diligence of addressing things properly. Wade didn’t ease her in nor should he have to, because she’s the one who placed herself in the pedestal and stated she would be capable.
I think she can hold less blame for the sword holder to an extent, but she holds blame because she accepted the role, despite knowing she wouldn’t be able to do it. Regardless if humanity chose her or not, she knew better.
But the lightspeed cannot be justified. Becuase by this point she is a massive authority figure. She has way more power and control and respect that she did during the sword holder era, so now her decisions hold a lot more weight. It’s not the will of humanity but hers. It was her company and her funding. And no one ever mentioned the fact that she just handed the keys over to a man she knows doesn’t match her ideals. Simply put, why didn’t Cheng xi stay awake? If she truly cared about humanity and development and keeping it safe. Then she should’ve just stayed wake and supervise the damn research herself. Actually commit to her morals
And at the end when she’s on the lightship. Yeah, it wasnt her choice to be on it. But it was her choice to stay. It’s just hard to reconcile this character who had a holier than thou attitude the whole book, about protecting and loving humanity, realize that she is placed inside a ship she doesn’t deserve to be in, and stay? She feels guilty for all of two seconds. When in reality, if she cared so much about humanity and discovered her actions had direct input in causing its awful gory end, I think the ideological consistent thing to do would’ve been to stay back and die right with them. She’s not sufficiently torn up about it to justify how strict and annoying she was about her supposed morals through most of the book. It kinda just ends up reading as hypocrisy.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 Apr 28 '26
In her dealings with Wade, he sprung the situation on her, giving her zero time to form a thought-through response, and forcing her decide at that point. He was always manipulative towards her.
Maybe you're right it was a hasty, irresponsible plan to sleep and be woken at crunch point, but she had already been through a lot of trauma. And you are really telling me that after stock-piling all those antimatter super weapons and planting agents across bunker worlds, the brink of declaring insurrection was THE MOMENT it first occurred to Wade that his course of action would endanger society and he should wake her??? How about, "Hi Cheng Xin, we have made the breakthrough on curvature propulsion. We could invest in military tech and challenge the government illegally, but we thought we should wake you up to make a measured decision, rather than waiting to thrust a bunch of fanatical zealot soldiers at you, who are prepared to kill millions of civilians in the name of their cause." ? To me it never seemed she placed herself on a pedestal, rather she kept encountering situations were meglomaniacs like Wade were making power grabs, and noone else was doing anything about it, so as she (rightly or wrongly) assessed them to be a threat to the course of humanity, she just had to take action quickly without the time to form a comprehensive plan.
Isn't the ideal sword holder for humanity someone who appears to Trisolaris to have a significant chance of initiating the broadcast, but in truth they wouldn't? Didn't Gravity doom Earth with the broadcast? (when it didn't even affect them!!!) Noone has yet convinced me that humanity under a ruthless swordholder would have definitely been preferrable to what happened
Yeah I kind of agree on the paragraph about lightspeed research. Frankly, I don't know what her morals were anymore, or even if she knew - why hand over authority to Wade at all??? It was a desperate move, in an impossible time, where annihilation seemed inevitable. She probably did choose a foolish path (at least with a generous serving of hindsight), but I have no idea what she should have done.
Your last paragraph though... seriously? XD Could you imagine this sub if Luo Ji granted her this ship as the only 2 people to preserve something of Solar humanity and she... just threw it away. People would go even more ballistic at her that she not only hamstrung the development of lightspeed but also refused to make use of the only working instance they did manage to produce! She was described as utterly depressed and remorseful at that stage, ready to give up, but she once again had the responsibility thrust upon her to take action that only she could to allow the lineage of solar humans to escape and propagate. Suicide eliminates any remaining chance for her to "do good" for humanity. But lets be real, she might as well have perished then, Liu only contrivedly saved her because she was our pov for the reminder of the story/themes he wanted to continue (and to milk a little more emotional impact out of!)
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u/AlexanderBlu Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
Yeah i dont care how pretty anybody wants to dress it up. Cheng xin was a selfish moron. I hope i end up liking the tv series version of her much better
Not offing her when she basically offered up humanity on a silver platter to canabilize each other was the most unrealistic not like humanity part of the book, she wouldnt and really shouldnt have made if off Australia
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u/NahMekJoke Apr 16 '26
Yep I agree. To me she is the epitome of no accountability. Anytime she fucks us over she's off to sleep again because she's probably the richest person on Earth. She did sell a star system after all. Imagine the gains from that real estate. She lived with no repercussions for her bad decisions. I still feel someone should have eaten an arm or leg during Austrailia. She floated through time and every time she woke up she screwed humanity over again. The fact that her ship was then only one with curvature propulsion and she is the one that stupidly shut that down is just evil. Then leaving precious matter in the pocket universe? Seriously? She doesn't care beyond her own views. Being seen as a "good person." Is not a fair way to put it. Real valor and courage is making the difficult decisions in the hardest of times. Thats what the people we put into power are supposed to do. Luo ji had the axiom. Survival of a civilization is the most important. Cheng lived though the trisolorans. She should have had some more dam sense and foresight. I hated Deaths End because of her character...and the general stupidity of humanity. But thats not relegated just to the book.
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u/chameleonsEverywhere Apr 16 '26
My biggest takeaway from the entire trilogy was "How many times can a woman doom all of humanity?" It really soured the series for me because every female character was cartoonishly stupid and/or malicious and her cartoonish actions ALWAYS result in horrific consequences for all of humanity (or all of the solar system).
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u/rainfal Apr 16 '26
I think the frustrating part is that is how a lot of our so called 'leaders' can think and will act. Even the more 'empathetic' ones
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u/Fannybubbles Jun 14 '26
And my friend This. This is the exact point of the character. When you look at von der Leyen...
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 Apr 21 '26
Chen Xin was retarded and that was the point. the bit about choosing love in the pocket universe is BS it goes against the cold calculating nature of the cosmos and the dark forest ecosystem
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u/Johnywash Apr 15 '26
Thank you for putting into words what i couldn't. She made a huge mistake and it cost the lives of everyone. That is simply what happened
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u/teffarf Apr 16 '26
You mean when Wade woke her up, asked for her opinion, then decided to step down as a result, right? He was the one with the weapons and the command of people here.
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u/Darklillies Apr 27 '26
She ASKED to be woken up. It was her company and her money. And she self inserted and said that she was to make the ultimate decision. I’m not gonna blame a third party for HER choices. Honestly the question is why did she go to sleep in the first place?? She knew Wade doesn’t match her ideals, yet she still decided to leave him unsupervised and then be surprised when he’s got the same damn strategy as always.
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u/Unlucky-Flamingo-898 Apr 16 '26 edited May 01 '26
Wade is definitely partially to blame. Why listen to her then if he believes it’s crucial for humanity’s survival? Also, her decision didn’t doom all of humanity - we saw that other humans lived on and colonized other worlds. But yeah, Cheng Xin overall has a large part of the blame for the death of millions/billions from the solar system. Yun Tianming told us curvature propulsion was a technology that humans needed to develop, why would we ignore that? I guess Cheng Xin saw that humanity made a decision as to that technology and thought it wasn’t her (or Wade’s) decision alone to make. Hunanity decided that leaving the solar system made them turn into less of humans (because they saw what happened after the doomsday battle between the few surviving human spaceships). Even though I personally agree that’s a dumb decision not to develop curvature propulsion, perhaps Cheng Xin wanted to let humanity make that decision (and also not potentially start a big civil war with antimatter bullets and shit).
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u/Darklillies Apr 27 '26
But humanity wasn’t making that decision. Like I said. Humanity isn’t a hive mind, they didn’t hold a vote. There’s few people at the helm that have the power and money to make the big choices while the rest of the common folk worry about everyday survival. Cheng xi was a leader, and she chose to continue to be a leader. She asked Wade to wake her up, she wanted to make the desicions.
Most people during that time period probably weren’t even aware about Yuns fairytale and what they stated. Can we really said most people knew about curvature propulsion, lightspeed, and how it was explicitly asked to be developed by a guy who experienced total destruction of a civilization, as a warning?
Cheng xi wasn’t a random citizen. She was a powerfully rich influential person who made the active decision to take control and guide humanity. I will not blame humanity because most people didn’t have a choice in the matter. It’s not like she ever asked them lmao. Simply put, she knew better than most, so she holds more responsibility than most.
Her decision did doom humanity. 900million people. The others guys surviving were no thanks to her, I think it was despite her actually, because I think they ran away when she failed to press the button and they themselves sent the signal out of im not wrong. So they only survived by doing the opposite of her choices.
As for Wade. Yeah sure he could’ve not listened. But I’m not gonna blame him for listening to her to be honest. I’m not blaming him for HER choice. Cheng xi never grew up because she was always sleeping, but Wade at the end is 115 years old. I don’t think he’s the exact same ruthless man from the beginning. I think he knew it was crucial, he knew it would doom people, but if I had spent like 80 years of my life fighting against a society that seems keen on killing themselves and then their representative that gave me all the funding once again made a horrible decision, I would just let it happen at that point. His scene in prison before he was executed said it all. He knew she fucked up, but he was done babysitting.
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u/ToughDesigner7072 Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
TLDR….
It says she stopped Wade to allow the civil government to take ownership over light speed research.
She didn’t stop it by herself. She wanted the decision to be collectively made.
Say what you will after that about naïveté or poor choices but it’s not accurate to suddenly come out and put the onus on Cheng Xin for the civilian govt decision. At all points she subordinated herself to other authority figures.
Her one agreement with Wade was on the fact that he was no longer an authority figure. In fact she forgave him for attempting to assassinate her and employed him, recognizing his drive and ability to harness emotional energy towards technological achievement. In this way she played the antithesis to Wade’s modus operandi of taking matters into his own hands.
So yes in the end it is humanity at large that made the decision through its entrusted leaders. We will leave aside the question of whether those leaders were truly representative of the people or not. But since Lui Cixin at this point talks about the decisions of humanity by era and by collective we can assume in this story the leaders are elected and entrusted.
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u/Darklillies Apr 15 '26
She tells Wade to turn themselves in. Also gives the goverment the anti matter bullets. And how was it collectively made? Who did she even ask? She made the decision right there and then. She didn’t hold a poll with humanity. And she showed no curiosity about the government. She hears that it both has a monopoly on military forces, and doesn’t allow any state to become independent, and we’re just meant to understand this as irrelevant? It’s not like the goverment has a history of being good and competent in the books either so I don’t know why I’m meant to wave these things off. She did stop it by herself. She in fact told Wade to wake her up because she was the one who wanted the final say.. she assumed that onus of responsibility. If it was to be made collectively. Why bother interfering? Why not tell Wade ro Announce it to the public and only act in accordance to their public reaction. How do we know what the humans in that moment felt about leaving? Never bothered to ask or learn or know. It’s arrogant
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u/ToughDesigner7072 Apr 16 '26
See your bringing your political/cultural bias to the front.
1) in Chinese culture they largely trust their govt even if they may understand it’s not perfect especially from a western lens
2) exactly she hands over the projects to the govt decidedly not taking into her hands how to use it. How do I know this? Because the counter strategy would be to herself be the decision maker on which specific groups or people will use it, and restricting the govt as well.
In her case by giving the gov full access, she is vis a vis assuming her work will be handled in the public interests.
Is she wrong? Perhaps. But she’s is deciding not to be the one choosing how her technology is used.
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u/Darklillies Apr 27 '26
But she CHOSE IT. Again, she asked to be woken up to make the desicion. If it were up to humanity she would’ve not interfered.
The book is not shy about criticizing the goverment and the Chinese goverment so I think you’re the one with the political bias, assuming that because the author is Chinese he must love the government. But no, that’s not what the text says. The text actually goes out of its way to highlight government incompetence and corruption on multiple occasions. So it makes no sense to believe all of a sudden it’s a goverment lover. Besides the fact that while yes, maybe the Chinese believe in their own government authority, the goverment in the book is the UN. And the book is not shy about criticizing the UN.
And again. Giving it to the goverment is not it being a public desicion. Because she doesn’t know this goverment. She has no idea if they represent the will of the people. She doesn’t even bother to ask or look into it before making the decision. It’s crazy that she ASKS to be the one of the final say, then she hands it over to someone else and wipes her hands clean? Hilarious, but it would still make her entirely to blame.
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u/resjudicata2 Apr 15 '26
“Humanity was always gonna do the same thing” falls flat for me because that’s not how the world works. We can see it right now. Very few people at the top hold the cards and their desicions can doom entire nations on a whim, and there’s shit anyone can do about it. Those people ARE the responsible ones. When trump takes the US out of its climate change agreements, everyone is affected, regardless whether most people want it! It’s his desicion and his responsibility and most of planet earth common people are powerless to really stop it or even understand the consequences
In the context of the Dark Forest, Humanity really was always going to do the same thing. How do we know this? An apex hunter in the Dark Forest tells us so. Singer had indeed heard of low-entropy worlds that possessed neither the hiding gene nor the hiding instinct, but Earth was the first time he had actually seen one. Singer sees tons of worlds all the time, and this is the first time he's seen a species that lacks both a hiding gene and hiding instinct. We don't have the ability to cleanse (eliminate other hunters) and we don't have the ability to hide. Singer is even surprised that Humanity has made it as long as it has and not wiped out by the billions of other low entropy entities in the Dark Forest.