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Sylvie Zhuang

Years before China’s DeepSeek stunned the world with its powerful open-source AI model, Chinese tech geeks began experimenting with the openness ethos through a collaboratively written open-source novel, still going strong after nearly two decades.
With millions of words spanning nearly 3,000 chapters, The Morning Star of Linggao has been crowd-written by thousands of contributors – mostly tech geeks, engineers, military enthusiasts and STEM professionals – who insert themselves as characters in the story.
The plot opens with an overworked, underpaid salesman at a poorly run foreign company in modern China who discovers a wormhole that transports him – and eventually more than 500 others like him – back in time over 300 years to the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644) in 1642.
The time travellers settle in Linggao, in today’s southern island province of Hainan, where they set out to ignite an industrial revolution, build infrastructure, establish a military base and alter the course of history to “make China great again”.
The late Ming dynasty setting was a deliberate choice, with its rampant corruption and weakened regime increasingly sealing the country off from the world through isolationist policies.
While Chinese civilisation was in steep decline, Europe was on the cusp of the early breakthroughs of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.
The story’s characters seize this pivotal moment of vulnerability, hoping that by injecting modern knowledge and industrial capacity they can reverse China’s historical backwardness and prevent it from lagging behind the West during the Industrial Revolution.
The authors identify with the so-called Industrial Party – not a formal political faction but a loose online community of techno-nationalists who believe that national strength is based on scientific advancement, technological progress and robust industrial capacity.
Work on the novel began in 2006, coinciding with China’s early tech boom, initially on a military-themed bulletin board-style forum. It has been updated almost nonstop ever since, running in parallel with the national drive for technological self-reliance.


While The Morning Star of Linggao has long enjoyed a dedicated following among China’s nerds and tech geeks, it remains a niche phenomenon – highly influential in elite technologist and engineering circles but not part of the broader mainstream.
Outside China, it was virtually unknown until January, when a feature in US magazine Wired hailed it as the country’s “greatest sci-fi novel you’ve never heard of” and described it as a profound reflection of the country’s modernisation ethos.
As part of its intense competition with the US to occupy the frontier of cutting-edge technologies, China has for years been cultivating and recruiting elite scientific minds, both domestically and overseas.
Though most contributors to The Morning Star of Linggao remain anonymous, among them are some of China’s brightest tech talents who use their expertise and knowledge to fill it with feasible storylines and solid technical details.
The writers have meticulously explored ways to build weapons, industry, air-conditioning systems and other modern necessities that would work within the exact economic, social and environmental conditions of the time.
Long-time reader Wang Jiang, who is also dean of Zhejiang Normal University’s Institute of China’s Borderland Studies, said that it was the novel’s rigorous, almost engineering-like approach that made it distinctive.
“Have you noticed that many time-travel dramas have the problem of plots being unrealistic? Characters just casually pull out ‘thousands of taels of silver’ from their pockets, but how did people in the past actually handle money and daily transactions?”
Wang, who has followed the novel since the 2010s, also noted that another challenge was that it was set in a time when epidemics were common in that part of the country. “If you travelled back to south China, how would you handle disease?” he said.
“They try to give fairly rigorous, practical answers to those questions. It doesn’t feel detached from reality. You get the sense that if you took this book with you and went back in time, you might actually be able to survive. That’s what makes it so compelling and addictive to read.”




Wang also praised the crowd-writing approach itself as embodying the spirit of China’s tech development. “This is in fact open-source writing, I think it is pretty advanced considering it took place in 2006.”
Artificial intelligence is the latest frontier in the US-China tech rivalry. China’s DeepSeek stunned the world early last year with its performance and low cost. It also made no secret of its recipe for success.
DeepSeek made its AI model open-source – which means anyone can see its algorithm and build on it – a rare move when most of the world’s leading models are closed-source to protect their codes.
It was interesting that the writers of The Morning Star of Linggao had earlier adopted a similar open-source model to “ponder on the possibilities of history” and “reflect on past failures”, Wang observed.
Jessica Imbach, a sinologist with Freiburg University in Germany, said that interest in Chinese sci-fi was “usually mainly motivated by an interest to understand Chinese viewpoints more generally”, but there was still a sense of the US leading in most sectors.
“One exception is infrastructure,” she noted.
It is something the novel is filled with details about, despite modern Linggao being not particularly developed by the rest of the country’s standards.
Over the past two decades, China has cemented its place as the leading manufacturer and builder of infrastructure. It has also stunned the world with its massive military equipment manufacturing capacity that can churn out new weapons quickly.
According to Imbach, some Western authors had a “fascination for infrastructure build-up in China and a growing despair over the US’ inability to build anything in this regard”.
These included the 2005 book Abundance, by American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and works by Dan Brown, the US author best known for The Da Vinci Code, she said.
“China’s incredibly impressive high-speed rail system more than anything has become a focus of international interest in China’s industrial capacity,” Imbach added.


Science fiction has increasingly served to showcase China’s scientific progress and assert its ambitions as a global technological leader. Notable examples include the blockbuster 2019 and 2023 The Wandering Earth films, adapted from the novella by Liu Cixin.
These depicted Chinese scientists leading humanity on a 2,500-year journey to relocate Earth to another star system, blending wild imagination with rigorous astronomy, engineering details and concepts like preserving consciousness in digital form.
Much of this creative output originates from China’s thriving web novel ecosystem, which allows freer expression and often sidesteps the strict censorship of traditional publishing. The web novels are also serving as a soft power tool.
A 2025 report on the global expansion of Chinese online literature found that the top overseas genres included fantasy romance, urban romance, urban supernatural, cultivation and fantasy stories.
AI translation has turbocharged this spread, according to the study, which found that in the past year alone, more than 10,000 Chinese novels were AI-translated and released online, an increase of roughly 280 per cent from 2024.


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News

China

The Morning Star of Linggao has attracted attention in the US but has remained outside the Chinese mainstream


The Morning Star of Linggao has attracted attention in the US but has remained outside the Chinese mainstream.


Germany

Why an open-source sci-fi novel by China’s tech geeks is going strong after 20 years

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Morning Star of Linggao has attracted attention in the US but has remained outside the Chinese mainstream

The Morning Star of Linggao has attracted attention in the US but has remained outside the Chinese mainstream