Sky Screen, Show Our Forebears History

Amid the smoke of war in 1931, a glowing crack suddenly split open in the sky. Lao Zhou, a survivor of the Northeastern Army, crawled out from a heap of corpses and looked up at the most astonishing sight of his life. Beyond the crack was another world: skyscrapers reaching into the clouds, iron boxes hurtling along, and lights that never went out all night. It wasn’t a miracle. It was a future that the Chinese people of 1931 could never have imagined.

From that day on, the sky screen appeared again and again, spanning the years from 1931 all the way to 1989. Ragged resistance fighters, farmers during the Great Production Campaign, builders from the early years of the People’s Republic, young people from the early days of reform and opening up... Generation after generation of Chinese people looked up at the sky and watched a live broadcast from an era called “2026.”

They saw the war finally end, their descendants no longer go hungry, planes crowd the sky like flocks of birds, and nights shine as brightly as day. They saw that the young faces on screen bore none of the fear and suffering etched onto their own…