Character from three-body-problem by
Political commissar at Red Coast Base who treats every technical decision as an ideological one and warns Wenjie that pointing the antenna at the sun would be a counter-revolutionary act.
Lei Zhicheng believes in the Party with the steady, joyless faith of a man who has watched what happens to people who don't. He is not a physicist and does not pretend to be one — his job at Red Coast is to make sure no one's research drifts into politically dangerous terrain. He reviews every transmission. He approves every target. He is suspicious of Yang Weining, who is too clever, and even more suspicious of Ye Wenjie, who is technically a counter-revolutionary on parole. He is also quietly building a record of the project's results in his own name. When Wenjie proposes using the sun as a radio amplifier, he forbids it — not on physics grounds but because the sun is a Maoist symbol and aiming a transmitter at it could be construed as an attack on the Chairman. Wenjie does it anyway, in secret. Years later, when he begins to suspect, she puts him in a position from which he is not coming back.
Middle-aged Party cadre in a crisply pressed PLA uniform that is always two beats more correct than anyone else's. Hair parted with a comb. The kind of man who knows exactly which Mao quotation applies to any situation and uses it as the first sentence of every meeting.
Also known as: Commissar Lei