THE GREAT CHINESE NOVEL

MILLIONS OF WORDS. HUNDREDS OF AUTHORS. THE MORNING STAR OF LINGAO IS BARELY KNOWN OUTSIDE CHINA BUT IT'S THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING THE COUNTRY'S MODERNIZATION AND MALAISE.

- AFRA WANG

MA QIANZHU WAS unsatisfied with Chinese progress. An engineer at a large state-owned enterprise, he belonged to a generation that grew up believing engineering is destiny, that China's future would be built, bolt by bolt, by people like him. Then Ma discovered something extraordinary: a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty. With more than 500 peers, he commandeered a ship and traveled back in time 400 years, to a preindustrial China wracked by foreign invasion and internal decay. Their mission: trigger an industrial revolution in the past that would, in the future, make modern China great (again).

This, strictly speaking, did not happen. It's the plot of The Morning Star of Lingao (A), a sprawling, collectively written science-fiction web novel that has consumed a corner of the Chinese internet for nearly two decades. It now totals millions of words. It has never been translated into English. Almost no one in the West knows it exists.

But I would argue-somewhat less strictly speaking that the events of the book did happen. That the time travel worked. And that the secret to understand ing modern China is all right there, contained within its prophetic, often frightening pages.

IN 2006, A post went up on SC BBS, China's earliest military-themed message board: What would you do if you could travel back to the Ming Dynasty with modern knowledge? The question struck a nerve. The Ming Dynasty occupies a painful place in Chinese historical consciousness. It was a period when Chinese civiliza tion entered a long decline, ending in the so-called Great Divergence. Europe embraced discovery, ascent, and construction; China sealed itself off. Joseph Needham's famous question-"Why did modern science develop in Europe but not in China?"-has haunted modern Chinese intellectual life ever since.

The Morning Star of Lingao emerged as a kind of internet-fueled continuation of this historic discourse.