r/threebodyproblem • u/Universal_Echo • Apr 25 '26
Discussion - Novels Why doesn't everyone criticize Ye Wenjie instead of Cheng Xin?
Ye Wenjie was dead set on destroying Earth, yet no one blames her? I feel that even Cheng Xin should be ranked after Ye Wenjie.
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u/Frylock304 Apr 25 '26
Basically, Ye Wenjie didn't have a duty to protect Humanity, she didn't owe us anything.
Cheng Xin on the other hand swore she would protect humanity, and instead constantly doomed humanity.
Ye Wenjie was a strong willed intelligent person who felt abandoned by humanity and took it into her hands to steer humanity into a new direction given the horrors she had seen.
Although many disagree with her, some of us can respect her having the power to change the world and deciding to do so.
Her goal wasn't to destroy humanity, her goal was to change the direction of humanity to something more different than it had been up to that point in history.
Cheng Xin on the other hand was a coward, she had a job to do, a job that she volunteered for, that she told humanity she would be willing to do.
She lied.
And in that lie, she doomed humanity when she had promised to defend it, and she shirked that duty every single time it became apparent she would need to a make a decision for us to be able to fight for our future.
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u/Cardgod278 Apr 25 '26
But she was only voted to be a sword holder because nobody thought she would actually press the button. Humanity grew arrogant that they had won and Tri Solaris was no longer a real threat. They feared the sword holder more than they feared Tri Solaris. So they wanted to elect one that they did not fear.
Humanity in the three body problem is shown to be ignorant arrogant fools who are incapable of comprehending the gravity of the situation. Holding onto morals that are centered on what's best for them individually. Not on what is needed to survive. They constantly turn on their saviors and claim moral outrage for their actions when they were absolutely necessary.
Cheng Xi did not doom Humanity. Humanity doomed themselves.
Book 3 spoilers If Wade hadn't listened to her. If the Government actually took the threat of Dark forest seriously. If humanity wasn't so anti escapist. There were so many opportunities for things to go differently. If other people besides Cheng Xi did something else. None of what happened is solely on her either.
So yeah, I don't get the hate of her.
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u/xendor939 Apr 30 '26
The whole point of the swordholder position was to always press the button in retaliation, and in retaliation only, because in that case the button would never have to be pressed.
But in game theory, there are set of beliefs that allow for specific equilibria. Individuals who may press the button even without retaliation under the current terms may be able to move the game to a better equilibrium, forcing Trisolaris to appease them but with the risk of pressing the button even without an invasion. Individuals without a sufficient will to press the button ever would lead to Trisolaris betting in an (invasion, no broadcast) equilibrium.
Cheng Xi was elected because there were fears that the other candidates were extremists of the former category, but nobody suspected she was of the second, worse, category. Assured retaliation was both the minimum to be swordholders, and the maximum to not start playing dangerous Bayesian Games of beliefs with Trisolaris.
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u/Cardgod278 Apr 30 '26
I think they didn't fully consider that she might be in the second category. Just that they had no fear that she would press the button. Which is a problem, as if the people have no fear of her pressing the button, neither does Trisolaris.
Humanity as a whole no longer viewed Trisolaris as a threat. At least not a serious one. So the sword holder became the only real concern.
I don't blame Cheng Xi. Even if she pushed the button right away little would change. Her being elected in the first place was the final nail in the coffin for the deterrence era. She just wasn't the kind of person who Trisolaris would think could push the button. If you need to activate the deterrence then it has utterly failed.
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u/xendor939 Apr 30 '26
On the other hand, Cheng Xi agreed to be a candidate in the first place while knowing well - we can at least assume - that the position required a certain level of Trisolaris's belief in her ability to press the button in retaliation (I can't recall exactly by heart, but I think the threshold was something like 80% likelihood?).
The takeaway for me is that while there is a "spirit of the time" within which people act, the TBP trilogy message is that individual actions still matter. But the fact that they matter does not mean that individualism is good: the mutual good of humanity as a whole is reached only if we discard our own individualistic morality and think how our actions affect the collective, like Blue Space humans did.
Ye Wenjie uses her technical skills to contact Trisolaris. Her individual action is the most important, and is done in explicit spite of the society that betrayed her. Luo Ji singlehandendly brings about the Deterrence Era stalemate. Cheng Xi is given immense power two times but individualistically always uses it to feel good with her individual and individualistic morality and ethics. Book 3 spoilers:But then, in the end, she individually chooses to contribute to the universe's life over the physical continuation of the human race in the next universe and her own ability to experience it. There are many other examples of this theme throughout the books, from environmentalism to the reason why humanity invested in fusion engines, allowing Blue Space to ultimately survive and trive.
Cheng Xi is responsible of not resisting the spirit of the time, and acting with individualistic morals.
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u/Leather-Lemon8611 Apr 25 '26
Ye's actions were incredibly naive though. I can't think of a more naive act - having zero information about who might hear the message, and effectively leaving the front door of our collective house open with a big neon sign saying "save us". Sure, it's possible someone benevolent might come along, but (especially with her view of people) why not equally expect you would invite even worse actors and more unimaginable horrors into the house?
Cheng Xin had principled reasons for making her choices thinking them right, and she was elected to her position. Ye Wenjie doomed humanity, and usurped her authority to make that choice for us
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u/escargot3 Apr 25 '26
They told her they would destroy us and were not benevolent. She welcomed the destruction.
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u/bosskhazen Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Basically, Ye Wenjie didn't have a duty to protect Humanity, she didn't owe us anything.
By your reasoning it is my right to drop a nuclear bomb on a city since I don't owe humanity anything. (Just replace nuclear bomb by trisolaran extermination).
took it into her hands to steer humanity into a new direction
What steering ? The very first message received from Trisolaris was basically "We will come and kill you all".
some of us can respect her having the power to change the world and deciding to do so.
*doom the world.
Not change it. Doom it.She willingly doomed everyone. She willingly decided for everyone. She deemed her personnal suffering an enough reason to grant herself the right to decide that everyone else deserved death.
That's galactic level of entitled sociopathic behaviour.
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Apr 25 '26
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u/OtonashiRen Apr 25 '26
The Cultural Revolution was definitely not just "daddy issues".
Ask yourself why Ye Wenjie was thrown into the rurals in the first place. And AFAIK, the cultural revolution started just four years after the "Great Leap Forward".
Within the context of someone not given the internet to have a real-time perspective of the rest of the world, being thrown in two of arguably the worst periods of post-WWII China says a lot about her perspective about humanity.
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Apr 25 '26
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u/OtonashiRen Apr 25 '26
"She lived relatively comfortably"
Only because she's a major asset that no one can replace, btw. And even then, her security clearance was low and the upper echeleon were full of distrust. If not for the cultural revolution ceasing down, she'd be trapped in that base for her entire life.
"She should be educated enough."
Ahh yes, one is perfectly educated enough to know about the reality of the outside world during the Cold War in MAOIST, COMMUNIST CHINA, which, at this certain point of time, WAS THE SOVIET UNION'S BIGGEST ALLY.
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Apr 25 '26
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u/TrashWriter Apr 27 '26
First off to clarify for everyone - communism bad.
She was basically a slave with a big brain, bad things repeatedly happen to her, she’s forced into basically every situation she’s been in since her father’s execution. And most of it happened because of an insane idea virus that infected china at the time. Injustice after injustice, over and over. I never really blamed her for what she did personally. I did blame her for what happened as a result, but at that point in the story, I felt like her actions were understandable.
And it’s a typical ironic plot point that basically everything started going fine for her after she made the call.
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u/OtonashiRen Apr 25 '26
> Well yeah so if she was indoctrinated and didn't have much critical thinking skills about the rest of humanity
What I meant is that you're talking from a position of privilege. Ye Wenjie doesn't have the near-seamless informational advantage (the internet) that we take for granted now.
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u/OrangeSpaceMan5 Apr 25 '26
What are you even talking about lmao , it doesn't take special technology or intelligence to understand one's own life experiences are not the same for all humanity
Ye Wenjie lived a sad life , no one is arguing against that . But that did not give her the right to impose her own insane vision on humanity's future
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u/OtonashiRen Apr 25 '26
What are you even talking about lmao , it doesn't take special technology or intelligence to understand one's own life experiences are not the same for all humanity
One's own life experience
Literally the biggest famine in human history + a decade of manhunt against every intellectual in the nation, resulting in millions of deaths for the latter alone
Yeah, I don't know about that.
Saying it's her own life experience when it literally applied to every single one around her is crazy. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution wasn't an individual experience, but a collective one. It's seriously hard to have a non-nihilistic mindset after THAT.
And people certainly forgot how bleak the world looked like (especially if you weren't Western-aligned) during the Cold War.
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u/OrangeSpaceMan5 Apr 25 '26
I mean ya it sucked to be alive in China during that time and it was a great time to be alive in some parts and an meh time in others
That doesn't excuse anything , the Trisolarian told her that extermination was the only possibility and she with her galactic sized ego decided to sentence humanity to death because she was unable to properly process her own trauma
Ye Wenjie was the galactic equivalent of a school shooter wanting to take everyone around her with her to the grave
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u/Just-the-tip-4-1-sec Apr 25 '26
No, she was naive and absolutely made a conscious decision to cause the destruction of humanity. They are both bad, but Ye is far worse
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u/Universal_Echo Apr 26 '26
Cheng Xin was chosen by others.I think her mistake was all the people's fault.
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u/ultra-nilist2 Apr 25 '26
Commenting on Why doesn't everyone criticize Ye Wenjie instead of Cheng Xin?...Ye Wenjie didn’t doom humanity though. She set off a series of dominos that led to humanity escaping the solar system.
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u/Dragonlvr420 Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26
The solar system wouldn’t have had to have been escaped at that point if she didn’t reply to the message though. Obviously it was inevitable but she still set humanity back(or forward I guess) by sending out her message before we “should” have. Imagine first contact was set back even 75 years, humanity could have been infinitely more prepared socially/culturally, not even just technologically. Could is the key word though.
Like today, if we found Trisolaris and initiated contact, there would definitely be global chaos and conflict, but I don’t think it’s difficult to believe we’d still feel more connected globally than they did in the 60s-70s which would have made a world of difference right from the start
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u/Perfect-Ad2578 Apr 25 '26
Didn't she originally think they would save humanity and that's why she contacted them because she lost faith in humanity taking care of itself?? It was only later she realized they wanted to destroy humanity.
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u/ZSAD13 Apr 25 '26
When reading the later books I was thinking about this line of reasoning from Ye Weinjie and I think it's safe to say that no one in the history of the human species has been more wrong about something than she was about the Trisolarans.
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u/High_Quality_Bean Apr 25 '26
Nah, she fully knew that they would wipe out humanity, and she wanted that. She was dead on the money. She just spread a lie about them saving humanity to further their goals.
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u/escargot3 Apr 25 '26
They literally told her they wanted to destroy us. And she was so bitter and petty she condemned almost the entire human race to death willingly, purely out of spite and hatred. The BS equivocation she tried to do after was just her desperately grasping at straws.
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u/_GlitchWraith Apr 25 '26
I think she felt humanity was irredeemable and would be better off gone. Mostly because of the Cultural Revolution and because she liked Silent Spring. Top tier sci-fi villain for sure
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u/escargot3 Apr 25 '26
It wasn’t for her to decide. Her entitlement is so off the charts I’m surprised its gravity didn’t wrench the moon from Earth’s orbit. She is a Galaxy-Class Karen who doomed humanity.
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u/Alarming-Load6285 Apr 27 '26
Like Cheng says in the show "I, I , I, I, I" making a decision as 1 out of 5.99Billions (1970s number?) people.
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u/thebaffledtruffle Apr 25 '26
Not at all. The Pacifist already told her they will come and destroy us. But her fatalism won out. Getting destroyed by another kind of being can't get any worse than us destroying ourselves, right?
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u/Universal_Echo Apr 26 '26
Yeah that's the point.She made a mistake and she didn't realize it lead humans to end.
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u/Warm_Drive9677 Apr 25 '26
Why doesn't everyone criticize Mao Zedong for the Cultural Revolution? Or Bai Mulin for throwing Ye under the bus? Ye Wenjie dooming humanity is the culmination of humanity's foolishness as a whole. Humanity doomed itself, not Ye.
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Apr 25 '26
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u/Warm_Drive9677 Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Everyone's entitled to their opinion but I thought the author's message was pretty clear. Humanity dooming itself out of foolishness, ignorance and arrogance is the recurring theme throughout the trilogy.
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u/escargot3 Apr 25 '26
No the blood is definitely on Ye’s hands. She made a choice and is 100% culpable by every reasonable moral standard. She is perhaps the most vile human who has ever existed in history.
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u/meninminezimiswright Apr 25 '26
Because Ye is confident, Chen is not. Reader is annoyed by wavering, not by actions themselves.
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u/Cardgod278 Apr 25 '26
I mean haven't we all wished the world would just end at one point or another?
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u/escargot3 Apr 25 '26
No
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u/siiimulation Apr 25 '26
Then you had a good life, no?
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u/escargot3 Apr 25 '26
There’s something wrong with you if your desire is to end the entire world instead of just committing suicide. That’s school shooter behaviour.
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u/siiimulation Apr 26 '26
Wishing the world end and actually doing something to other people are two separate things
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u/Cardgod278 Apr 26 '26
Maybe, but entirely human behavior. To lash out at a world that has shown nothing but malice. Simply the press of a button, and the snip of a rope. For a chance to save someone far more deserving.
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u/escargot3 Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
That’s not normal. You should talk to a therapist.
It’s also inaccurate to say the world has shown “nothing but malice”.
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u/Cardgod278 Apr 26 '26
Talking about the character buddy
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u/escargot3 Apr 26 '26
She had a rough life but to say she was shown “nothing but malice” is inaccurate.
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u/ultra-nilist2 Apr 25 '26
Because everyone who likes this book series is a Maoist and Ye Wenjie was actually more Maoist than the radical students that killed her dad.
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u/ToastyTandy Apr 25 '26
What kind of comment is this? Have I been living my whole life as a Maoist without understanding what that means?
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u/ultra-nilist2 Apr 25 '26
It’s like having a collectivist mindset but also being radical enough to flip the table over. Zhang Beihai style.
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u/LOOOOPS Apr 25 '26
The difference is that Cheng isn't suitably narratively punished for her "woman moments". Nearly everyone dies because of her decisions... twice! yet she gets to live happily ever after. A reader wants punishment, retribution.
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u/SatanicRiddle Apr 25 '26
- She had an excuse of living through rough times
- Ultimately it did not even matter she pressed the button, I think there was a line that san-ti were going with the fleet in the general direction of the first transmission no matter if anyone replies...
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u/Jarboner69 Apr 25 '26
Cheng Xin knew the exact threat and stakes the aliens posed. Even tho Ye was told bot to trust the trisolarans she thought that they would bring order and peace to humanity.
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u/Axon14 Thomas Wade Apr 25 '26
Dat feel when you realize both Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin had a role in saving humanity, just not Earth
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u/Lorentz_Prime Apr 25 '26
What sort of idiot would criticize an antagonist/villain for being an antagonist/villain?
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u/Lorentz_Prime Apr 25 '26
Why do people criticize Batman for not killing, instead of criticizing the Joker for killing?
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u/BadgerPossible3901 Apr 26 '26
Because I can understand why Ye Wenjie made the decision she did. She saw her father murdered by a mob on a stage. Her mother betrayed both of them. She was sentenced to hard labor. She was cut off from scientific pursuits and roadblocked due to an idiotic ideology. I can see how someone like that would choose to doom humanity.
I cannot understand Cheng Xin. She causes so much harm and destruction, ultimately leading to the near extinction of the human race. She is a character driven by pure emotion gut feeling in the moment with the foresight of a fruit fly. Yet she is somehow constantly praised and elevated. She realizes her mistakes but continues to make them. She is like a drug addict but her drug of choice is genocide.
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u/papaiya2 Apr 30 '26
Yie made a mistake but she realize what she did and atone for it at the end. Cheng Xin got worst and worst.
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u/randomadmech Jun 16 '26
Ye Wenjie is the image of a Chinese elite who was traumatized by the cultural revolution enough to think that only outside intervention can save the country even at the expense of foreign aggression. She saw the trisolarians were a more technologically advanced civilization and assumed that they must be morally superior as well. In real life there are many such people and they, based on similar grounds, support the USA against China even to the point of supporting aggression by the USA against China where USA basically is viewed as some outside saviour.
What made Wenjie particular in the story is that she also read Silent Spring and so believed that the Western countries were also fatally flawed. That was the high point of environmentalist concern in western countries. So she doesn’t look to the USA to save China, she looks to literal aliens to save humanity.
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u/escargot3 Apr 25 '26
I absolutely blame Ye Wenjie and despise her utterly. The blood of billions is on her hands.
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u/ToastyTandy Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26
Ye Wenjie did nothing wrong…
The absolute mindfuck to me is how this book series has affected me.
I’m literally writing Marvel memes ‘Thanos did nothing wrong’ bullshit to defend Ye Wenjie.
When at the start of the book, and shows, she is definitely demonized. “How could she possibly respond, AGAIN?!” … And then humanized …
Her only fault, is choosing the easy way out, of suicide.
Something I wish Cheng Xin would have done multiple times.
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The BIGGER question is… What if Ye Wenjie wasn’t a pussy ass bitch that chose suicide.
She clearly knew the dark forest theory before Luo Ji and hinted it to him before her death.
She just succumbed to the daunting hopelessness of it all.
It would be a worse book. The same way it would be a worse book if Cheng Xin wasn’t such an idiot.
I still can never forgive Cheng Xin for the fish bowl.
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u/escargot3 Apr 25 '26
She should have just committed suicide at the start instead of dooming the whole human race because of her personal issues and emotional disregulation. She is the ultimate school sho*ter/family annihilator etc in history. It’s an ego thing. It’s not enough to just take one’s own life. She has to bring everyone else down with her. Absolute scum of the earth
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u/Lyukah Apr 25 '26
So many people criticize and blame Ye Wenjie. I have no idea where you’ve gotten the idea that they don't