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

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.

South China Morning Post