Liu Cixin's "Three-Body Problem" Part 3: Ye Wenjie, Shao Lin and the Red Guards

(3) Ye Wenjie, Shao Lin and the Red Guards

Both Liu Cixin himself and his work "Three-Body Problem" have a strong misogyny complex. The villains or those who cause trouble in the article are generally women; while the ones who save the world are all men (of course there are exceptions, but generally speaking). Others will talk about it later, and now we will only talk about Ye Wenjie and people related to Ye Wenjie, Shao Lin and the female red guards.

Liu Cixin portrayed Ye Wenjie very well. The book spends a lot of time describing the various persecutions that Ye Wenjie suffered, such as losing her father and mother due to the Cultural Revolution, being abused by political cadres, and being betrayed by reporter Bai Mulin, etc. It portrays a woman who is full of bitterness and hatred, and is full of resentment and distrust for human beings. image. Liu Cixin must have known and contacted such victims in reality, or studied relevant historical archives and news materials, in order to portray a character like Ye Wenjie thoroughly. Like the above-mentioned portrayal of the bomb girl, Liu Cixin obviously has a lot of research on the behavior of victims of society planning revenge on society.

However, unlike the contempt and disgust for Bomb Girl, Liu Cixin has a certain amount of sympathy for Ye Wenjie. But fundamentally, Liu Cixin still classifies the victims of the era like Ye Wenjie as those who destroy the mainstream social order. Although Liu expressed more sympathy for Ye, he still viewed Ye from the perspective of mainstream society and counter-insurgents, that is, he would never praise the resistance of victims and the weak, but reminded the world to beware of such people. In Liu's writing, Ye Wenjie brutally killed her husband Yang Weining and her leader Lei Zhicheng, and caused the Three-Body Disaster to flood the earth. In the final analysis, Ye Wenjie is a sinner, a great sinner. Looking at "The Three-Body Problem" alone may not be so obvious, but compared with Chekhov, Maupassant, Ba Jin and other authors who eulogize the struggle of the weak who have been insulted and damaged, Liu Cixin's harshness towards victims and maintenance of order are incomparable It is clearly reflected. In the book, Ye Wenjie was poured cold water all over her body and blanket by a political cadre in winter, and Liu Cixin also poured cold water into the heart and liver of the weak with a pen.

In Liu Cixin's writing, Ye Wenjie redeemed herself by giving Luo Ji lectures on cosmic sociology, and was subsequently arrested and tried, and received the "deserved" punishment. The trauma suffered by Ye Wenjie was all blamed on Bai Mulin and other individuals, rather than the system and political power or even the culture and social structure. Even if the book vaguely mentions the background of the times and people's helplessness in the context of political turmoil, it still adheres to the red line of not involving criticism of historical reality. Shouting, reflection, and denunciation are absolutely unacceptable.

Moreover, looking at the whole book, it is reasonable to assume that Liu Cixin is using Ye Wenjie to "transform" the earth with the power of the three bodies, which is a metaphor for the social victims of China to lead the invasion of the United States. Or, at least, other people can reasonably understand it that way. This understanding of the relevant plot was mentioned in an article by a Chinese-American reporter in The New Yorker interviewing Liu Cixin. According to such a metaphorical inference, Liu Cixin's criticism of ETO for introducing the Three-Body Problem into the Earth is to criticize some "leading the way parties", or to force the Chinese liberals to be "leading the way parties". A reason to be sought after.

Another negative female character Liu Cixin portrays is Ye Wenjie's mother, Shao Lin. The image of this female character is negative. She not only betrayed her husband and wife and criticized her husband (but also opened her eyes and told nonsense, denying the generally accepted physical theorems as a physics expert). She alienated and abandoned Ye Wenjie with her new husband. This kind of plot should not be uncommon during the Cultural Revolution, and it is not uncommon to say that it is not uncommon when many disasters occur. What Liu wrote is a reproduction of the facts. But the problem is that Liu vilifies this forced self-preservation of women, implying women's ungratefulness. Moreover, in this article (including any other articles by Liu Cixin) there is no image of a man who always abandons a woman. On the contrary, there is an image of a man like Luo Ji who seems cynical but is very loyal and loving to his wife and children. Of course, it is not necessary for a work to deliberately maintain a balance on gender issues, but the text is born from the heart, combined with Liu Cixin's entire book and the values expressed in his daily life, there are sufficient reasons to believe that it is gender-biased.

The three female Red Guards depicted in the article can better reflect Liu Cixin's misogyny complex. In the article, three women, two men, and five Red Guards were deliberately written. The three female Red Guards were middle school students, and the two male Red Guards were college students. The three female middle school student Red Guards were very violent and savage, completely unreasonable. They only used slogans to deny Ye Zhetai's rebuttal based on facts, and then beat Ye Zhetai to pieces, and finally died. On the contrary, the male Red Guards " had (had) a sliver of sympathy for the teacher ", and when the three female Red Guards were about to kill Ye Zhetai, they shouted "the highest instruction: fight with literature and not with violence " (well, here is another Mao's justification) tried to prevent the tragedy.

During the Cultural Revolution, there were indeed many violent female Red Guards and other "revolutionary" women. It was a group of female students headed by Song Binbin who killed Bian Zhongyun, the principal of the Girls' High School Attached to Beijing Normal University. In addition, there are also many records of female Red Guards and rebels beating and murdering people. For example, Ji Xianlin recalled that the female rebel leader Nie Yuanzi commanded the rebels to persecute Peking teachers and students. Official history scholars such as Yang Jisheng specifically mentioned the rampage of young and young women, as well as various atrocities committed by some women who became Red Guards and rebel leaders, and were surprised by the madness of women, especially young women. In Beijing, the capital where the Cultural Revolution was most intense, and on some occasions, the female Red Guards did display extraordinary destructive power, and their atrocities were obvious to all.

However, this does not mean that women in violent movements such as the Cultural Revolution were generally more brutal and anti-intellectual than men. On the contrary, the majority of beatings and killings during the Cultural Revolution were still men, which is also proved by a large number of facts, especially those involving various perverted abuses were mostly committed by men. For example, most of the violent cases or incidents mentioned in Feng Jicai's "Ten Years of a Hundred People" were done or dominated by men. The reason why the violence of the female Red Guards is so eye-catching is largely because of the huge contrast between their tyrannical behavior and the traditional positioning of women in society and their performance before the tyranny. It becomes more prominent and specific. This just reflects the discipline and restraint of women in a patriarchal society, so that even if women do some bad behaviors like men, they will get more objections and condemnation. Of course, women's violence does have its unique features and some actions are more radical and fanatical than men at certain moments, but if this creates the impression that "women are more violent, more fanatical and more likely to be incited", it is entering patriarchy. Constructed consciousness nests. In other words, even if this is a reality that exists sometimes and should not be stripped of the background, it should not be evaluated from the perspective of traditional prejudice.