Character from remembrance-of-earths-past by
PLA Navy political commissar, secret Escapist, and the man who hijacked the warship Natural Selection to flee the Solar System rather than die in the Doomsday Battle. The defector whose murder of three colleagues with engineered meteorites bought humanity its only seed-ship.
Beihai is the great long-game player of the trilogy, a man who lies for two hundred years to save the species and dies before anyone knows he was right. In public he is the ultimate true believer in human victory, the political officer who keeps morale up; in private he assesses the Trisolaran threat with cold clarity and concludes that escape is the only survival. His murders of the three old physicists are committed with the same careful brushwork as everything else he does — meteorite fragments machined to look like accidents. He is patient enough to wait through hibernation for the right ship at the right moment, and decisive enough to seize it in seconds. His calm in the Battle of Darkness is the calm of someone who chose this exact outcome years before the trigger was pulled.
A career officer in his fifties at the start of the Crisis, tall and severe, with the close-cropped graying hair and starched uniform of a senior Chinese naval political commissar. After hibernation and decades in zero gravity he is taller still, almost spindly, with the elongated bones of the Solar Fleet generation. His face is calm in a practiced way. He never raises his voice and almost never blinks.
Also known as: Beihai, Commissar Zhang, 章北海