Then Ma discovered something extraordinary: a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty. Their mission: trigger an industrial revolution in the past that would, in the future, make modern China great (again). It’s the plot of The Morning Star of Lingao (临高启明), a sprawling, collectively written science-fiction web novel that has consumed a corner of the Chinese internet for nearly two decades. And that the secret to understanding modern China is all right there, contained within its prophetic, often frightening pages. Joseph Needham’s famous question—“Why did modern science develop in Europe but not in China?”—has haunted modern Chinese intellectual life ever since.