Blazing Red Skies: Transmigrating to the Age of Awakening to Witness History

This story will take you along the path of China’s awakening. In 2023, history PhD Chen Yanqing is checking and correcting footnotes in a library when his fingertips brush a copy of Youth Magazine, the precursor to New Youth. In an instant, he is hurled back to the Red Building at Peking University in Beiping, 1915.

He is no prophet with a golden finger, but an “old soul” carrying memories of the future, plunged into a tempestuous age when the “New Youth” are using their passion to challenge heaven and earth. History is no longer a safe collection of documents to him. It is the acrid smell of coal smoke, the biting wind, the dull thud as military police beat down a friend beside him, and the quietly burning flame behind Li Dazhao’s glasses.

He knows every storm and hidden reef that this land will face over the next thirty years, but that knowledge weighs on him like a thousand tons. He cannot prophesy or force things to happen before their time. He can only choose the hardest path: to become a “piece of kindling,” a “bearer of the flame.”

He moves between the fierce intellectual debates in Peking University classrooms and the grimy hardships of the Changxindian railway workshops, “translating” the truth of The Communist Manifesto into an account of workers’ blood and tears that they can understand. He witnesses the cries in the streets during the May Fourth Movement, and the collapse and awakening of the work-study mutual aid groups. In the end, he secretly heads south, becoming a silent guardian and witnessing the Red Boat on South Lake in the drizzle