You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel

Ma’s moment arrived in 2011. On July 23, two high-speed trains collided near Wenzhou, killing 40 people. The accident traumatized the nation for what it seemed to reveal about the costs of China’s breakneck pace of development. A prominent essay captured the mood, its title becoming a rallying cry: “China, Slow Down, Wait for Your People.” The prose read almost like prayer: “China, please stop your flying pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience!”

Ma and other Industrial Party voices responded with a counteroffensive. The solution wasn’t to slow down but to double down, they said—to learn from mistakes, to push through the difficult phase when new technologies were still being mastered. And key to their campaign was Lingao itself. The writing of it became a phenomenon across Chinese internet forums in the 2010s: Its open source ethos and collaborative methods deeply appealed to China’s burgeoning tech community. Beyond regular meetups among core contributors, Lingao’s creation fostered the formation of China’s “keyboard politics”—online communities where users engage in fierce debates about governance, policy, and national direction under the protection of pseudonyms. These conversations became staging grounds for political arguments that couldn’t happen elsewhere, where amateur policy wonks, military enthusiasts, and armchair strategists honed their worldviews. In 2012, the nationalist commentary website Guancha (think of it as China’s Breitbart) was founded, and its complex entanglement with Industrial Party thought and personnel networks demonstrated how far Lingao’s influence extended beyond mere time-travel fiction.

Industrial Party ideology ends up being quite Darwinian. What matters most is the power that flows from industrial capacity. This contributes to what scholars refer to as the party’s “aesthetic.” Fred Gao, a Beijing-based journalist who identifies with the Industrial Party and who briefly worked for Guancha, told me: “These people view industrialization as the highest form of beauty. Building things from nothing—that’s their romanticism.”

Of course, the techno-nationalist impulse transcends borders. “Elon Musk is the ultimate Industrial Party figure,” Gao said. Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars, his impatience with regulation, his worship of engineering solutions, his conviction that making physical things matters more than anything else—his “aesthetic has strong resonances with the Chinese Industrial Party,” Gao said. What differs is simply the political system that channels it.

Almost nobody, including me, can finish all the chapters of Lingao (to say nothing of the more than 1,400 derivative works). It’s not just that it’s too long. Reading it is quite painful. The novel’s language and narrative structure are aggressively anti-literary. To write beautifully would be bourgeois, the Industrial Party seemed to believe. Technical descriptions veer into what feels like self-indulgence, an uncomfortable disregard for readers without STEM backgrounds.

The book asks questions like: How do you solve energy problems when you can’t drill for oil? How do you begin mechanization without the machine tools to make machine tools? How do you produce nitric acid when you’re starting from literally dirt? From Chapter 22, as the 500 time travelers plan their expedition to colonize Lingao County in Hainan (the southern island in China):