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Ye Wenjie is one of the main characters of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, a series of science fiction novels written by Chinese author Liu Cixin. She was an astrophysicist and the first person to establish contact with the Trisolarans, and later becomes the spiritual leader of the Earth-Trisolaris Organization, which conspires against humanity to aid the Trisolarans.
In Bilibili's animated adaptation, she was voiced by Yang Chen. In Tencent's Three-Body, she was portrayed by Wang Ziwen in flashbacks and by Jin Chen in the present. In Netflix's 3 Body Problem, she was portrayed by Zine Tseng in flashbacks and by Rosalind Chao in the present.
Personality[]
Ye Wenjie was a tragic individual, who was shaped into becoming a cold, emotionless, and misanthropic human due to years of misfortune, which began when she witnessed her own father get beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution. During her time at Red Coast Base, she began to view humanity as incapable of solving its own problems, which served as the catalyst for her inviting the Trisolarans to Earth. Her intentions could be argued to be noble, as she wanted the Trisolarans to guide humanity to the right path, but the situation grew beyond her control, which she admits.
She possesses a high sense of honor, refusing to admit to any wrongdoing she believes she hasn't done, even under threat of life imprisonment.
Despite her somewhat loveless marriage to Yang Weining, she did seem to care for their daughter, Yang Dong, and was saddened by her death.
Biography[]
The Three-Body Problem[]
At the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, Ye Wenjie witnesses her father be beaten to death by Red Guards for teaching the "reactionary" Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. One of the Red Guards is her younger sister, Ye Wenxue, and they are also supported by her mother, Shao Lin. Having written a paper on 'The Possible Existence of Phase Boundaries Within the Solar Radiation Zone and Their Reflective Characteristics', Ye is forced to join a labor brigade in Inner Mongolia. While there, she meets a journalist who enlists her help in transcribing a letter to the government. However, the letter contains policy suggestions viewed as seditious by the government, so the journalist betrays Ye and she is sent to prison.
While in prison, she is recruited by two military physicists, Yang Weining and Lei Zhicheng, to join Red Coast Base, with the hope that she will one day be politically rehabilitated. Considering the options are either that or life imprisonment, Ye accepts. Initially advertised as a military base to damage foreign spy satellites, Ye later discovers that Red Coast Base's true purpose is to search for extraterrestrial life. While there, the other workers repeatedly take credit for her work - particularly Lei Zhicheng, who desires to elevate his political status.
One day, Ye discovers a means of amplifying radio waves by using the sun, and transmits a message with a self-decoding system into the cosmos, with the hope that an advanced civilization will pick it up. The message contains information about Earth's history and culture, but does not reveal the planet's location.
Over the next years, Ye's reputation starts to improve and she is allowed to teach children from a nearby school. Her relationship with Yang grows into a romantic one, while her relationship with Lei continues to deteriorate. Amazingly, eight years after her discovery, Ye receives a reply from an alien pacifist, who warns her not to respond or else its civilization will be able to find and conquer Earth. Ye learns from the message that the alien is from a planet called Trisolaris, and learns about the planet's fascinating history. Due to it only taking eight years to receive a reply, Ye deduces that Trisolaris is in the Alpha Centauri star system. Having grown disgusted with humanity due to the constantly shifting political climate and the hypocrisy of her peers, to the point where she no longer feels any warmth or love in her heart, she disregards the alien's warning and transmits a reply, inviting the Trisolarans to Earth to solve humanity's problems.
Unfortunately, Lei discovers the alien's message too, and wanting to take credit for Ye's discovery, forbids her from replying, unaware that she already has. Fearing for the worst should anyone find out, Ye arranges Lei's death in an accident where he falls from a nearby cliff due to a faulty winch - in reality sabotaged by Ye. Sadly, before she is about to commit the murder, Yang offers to go and assist Lei, and she is forced to kill both of them. She collapses due to the stress of having to kill the two men, and when she wakes up, is told she is pregnant with Yang's child.
With the end of the Cultural Revolution and having been politically rehabilitated, Ye is finally allowed to return to Beijing. She learns that her sister died during a faction war between the Red Guards, and briefly reconnects with her mother, but she leaves and never returns after her mother absolves herself of any blame for her father's death and places it all on Ye. She raises her child, Yang Dong, as a single mother and finds employment as a physics professor at Tsinghua University.
While working, Ye was asked by the university to help pick a site for a large radio astronomy observatory. She finds a quiet village in northwest China, which is almost completely barren due to deforestation. While there, she encounters Mike Evans, an American who is planting trees, hoping to bring birds back to the area. Ye learns that Evans is the son of the CEO of the world's largest oil company, and is a radical environmentalist who despises humanity for their disregard of the natural world, believing in something he calls "Pan-Species Communism", in which he believes animals are equals to humans.
A few years later, Ye is contacted again by Evans, and they agree to meet on the hill where they first met. Evans explains that his father passed away and left most of his considerable wealth to him, but he doesn't know what to do with the money. Initially, he wanted to use it to further his environmental cause, but he found no one that would listen, and even if he spent all his money on protecting animals, it would ultimately not fix anything due to how ingrained animal abuse is in human culture. Ye decides to confide in him about the Trisolarans, and how they can be an outside force to "fix" humanity. Evans promises to verify her claims by building a listening post to receive interstellar messages.
Ye and Evans meet again sometime later, aboard the Judgement Day, an old tanker which has been converted into a mobile listening post similar to Red Coast Base. Evans announces the creation of the Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO), a semi-secret organization dedicated to helping the Trisolarans invade Earth, and appoints Ye as its leader. The organization attracts many within the scientific elite who are disappointed with current world affairs. They create a sophisticated virtual reality video game called Three-Body which mimics Trisolaris to use as a recruitment tool.