Location from remembrance-of-earths-past by
The People's Republic of China — birthplace of the Trisolaran crisis. Where Red Coast hid in the mountains, where the Cultural Revolution killed Ye Zhetai, where the ETO took root in basement bookstores, where the Battle Command Center sat behind the Forbidden City wall.
China in the trilogy is a country still digesting the wound of the Cultural Revolution while becoming the species' technical leader. It is the country that built Red Coast and the country that signed the Wallfacer Treaty. The Beijing Public Security Bureau supplies Da Shi; Tsinghua University supplies Ye Wenjie; the Frontiers of Science recruit out of Shanghai labs and Hong Kong tower offices. Everything has political weight. Even a phone call.
A vast country of basins and rivers and crowded cities, laid across an east Asia that runs from desert to subtropics. Beijing's gray winter haze, Shanghai's neon canyons, the pine-shadowed Khingan ridge in the northeast, the lakes and bamboo of the south. By the late Crisis Era, mag-lev rails sweep between megacities while ancient hutongs survive in the cracks.