Character from remembrance-of-earths-past by
Chief engineer of Red Coast Base, husband of Ye Wenjie, posthumous father of Yang Dong — the man who pulled Ye out of a Khingan logging camp and offered her a life sentence in a top-secret radio observatory disguised as a missile-defense test.
Yang Weining is a careful man in a system that punishes care. He chose experimental physics over theoretical physics because experiments cannot get you accused of wrong-think; he chose engineering at Red Coast over a Beijing professorship for the same reason. He is genuinely, quietly in love with Ye Wenjie and protects her exactly as far as he can without endangering the project. He does not know that she is using the same transmitter to commit a slow act of cosmic arson. He dies before he learns.
A tall man in his forties, narrow-shouldered, with the round wire-rim spectacles and high-buttoned tunic of a 1970s Chinese senior scientist. His hair is parted and oiled. He moves carefully in the cold, hands often clasped behind his back. There is a perpetual mild concern in his eyes, the look of a man checking the weather.
Also known as: Yang, Engineer Yang, 杨卫宁