The Three-Body Problem: Chapter 27 Summary & Analysis

Upon returning to Tsinghua, Ye was asked to help the university pick a site for a large radio astronomy observatory. Eventually, she settled on a quiet, hilly village in northwest China. The once-beautiful place now felt barren: most of the hills had been deforested, and erosion had caused the ground to break and slide. Ye was surprised, then, to hear of a mysterious foreigner named Bethune who was planting trees up in the hills, hoping to restore birds to the area. 

Her curiosity sparked, Ye asked the villagers to introduce her to this stranger up in the hills. To her surprise, Ye saw that the man was a white American; he introduced himself not as Bethune but as Mike Evans, and he explained that he was trying to save lives. When Ye asked which people Evans was trying to save, he asked Ye, “Why does one have to save people to be considered a hero? Why is saving other species considered insignificant?” Evans believed that humans did not deserve “saving”; instead, he wanted to focus on protecting vulnerable animals.  

In this village, Evans’s particular goal was to save a dying breed of swallow. Though the bird was about to go extinct, no one seemed to care because “they’re not as crowd pleasing as giant pandas.” After a few months of planting trees for the swallows, however, Evans ran out of money. As he explained to Ye, though his father was a billionaire, he refused to bankroll any of his son’s environmental projects.

Evans told Ye the story of his life: his father had made his money as an oil executive. When Evans was 12, there was a gigantic oil spill from one of his father’s tankers, and Evans himself saw the sea birds covered in black goo, dying. Despairing, Evans sought guidance from his father—but instead of offering comfort, the oil executive suggested that because so many species were going extinct, no actions really mattered anymore. Evans’s father thus taught his son his rules for “the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.”

For Evans, this moment shaped his worldview—but rather than accepting his father’s philosophy, he devoted his life to rebelling against it. As he grew older, Evans formulated the philosophy of “Pan-Species Communism,” which extended the idea of universal human rights to all species on earth.

Years went by, and Ye and Evans did not speak. Finally, though, Evans reached out, and they agreed to meet on the same hill where they had first encountered each other. Though Evans’s trees had grown, deforestation had moved even more quickly, and the forest was almost bare. When Ye asked, she learned that the forest was falling so fast because two villages were competing for the logging profits.

In the years that had gone by, Evans’s father had died and left Evans all of his money. But money did not soothe Evans’s fears: rich countries would keep shifting polluting industries to poor countries, and poor people would keep exploiting natural resources just to stay alive. Evans had once hoped that the East would allow Pan-Species Communism to thrive; though Christianity tells the story of the Ark of Man, Buddhism prioritizes saving all life. But by this time, Evans was realizing that people everywhere are “the same.”

Ye agreed, expressing her belief that humanity’s only hope to save itself comes from an outside force. She then confessed to Evans her contact with the Trisolarans. When she finished, Evans promised to devote his resources to the cause, and the two shook hands, becoming “comrades.”