Lingao vs. Real Colonial History: Uncomfortable Parallels
Five hundred technologically superior outsiders arrive on a tropical shore, establish a settlement, exploit local labor, reorganize the economy to serve their interests, and reshape society according to their values. This is the premise of Illumine Lingao. It is also, uncomfortably, a reasonable summary of how colonialism worked.
The Elephant in the Room
The novel's Chinese readership has not failed to notice the parallel, and online discussions about Illumine Lingao regularly erupt into passionate debates about whether the transmigrators are heroes, villains, or something more complicated. These debates are worth examining because they illuminate real tensions in how we think about progress, power, and the ethics of intervening in other people's lives — even with the best of intentions.
The comparison to colonialism might seem unfair at first glance. After all, the transmigrators are Chinese themselves, traveling back in time within their own civilization. They are not foreign invaders from a distant continent. They share language, ethnicity, and broad cultural heritage with the people they encounter. They do not arrive with explicit plans to enslave, plunder, or exploit. Many of them genuinely believe they are helping.
But strip away the surface details and examine the structural dynamics, and the parallels become harder to dismiss. A small group with overwhelming technological superiority establishes control over a territory and its people. They reorganize the local economy to serve their industrial project. They recruit local labor for enterprises that primarily benefit themselves. They make decisions about the future of the local population without consulting that population in any meaningful way. They are convinced that their way of life is superior and that their intervention will ultimately benefit everyone, even if some coercion is required along the way.
This is not just the story of Lingao. It is the story of the British East India Company, the Spanish conquistadors, the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Indochina, and the Americans in the Philippines. In every case, the colonizers told themselves — and sometimes genuinely believed — that they were bringing civilization, progress, and improvement to backward peoples. The language of benevolence has always been colonialism's most effective disguise.
The "Benevolent" Colonizer
The concept of benevolent colonialism has a long and inglorious history. The British justified their rule over India partly through the claim that they were bringing modern law, education, railways, and sanitation to a society mired in superstition and inefficiency. Rudyard Kipling's infamous poem "The White Man's Burden" presented colonialism as a selfless duty, a thankless task undertaken for the benefit of "sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child." The French spoke of their mission civilisatrice, their civilizing mission, as if the cultures they were displacing had produced nothing of value.
The transmigrators of Illumine Lingao do not use this language explicitly, but their attitude often mirrors its assumptions. They look at seventeenth-century Hainan and see poverty, disease, ignorance, and oppression — all real problems, to be sure. Their solution is to remake society along modern industrial lines, with themselves in charge of the process. They rarely ask whether the local population wants to be remade. They assume that the benefits of modernization are self-evident, that anyone who understood what was being offered would naturally embrace it.
This assumption is the core of the colonial mindset, and the novel is more aware of it than it might initially appear. There are moments when local people resist the transmigrators' plans, not out of ignorance but out of a reasonable assessment that the changes being imposed will disrupt their lives, undermine their social structures, and render their existing skills and knowledge obsolete. A fisherman who has spent decades mastering the currents and weather patterns of the South China Sea does not necessarily welcome being told that his methods are primitive and need to be improved. A village elder whose authority rests on traditional social hierarchies does not celebrate the arrival of outsiders who treat those hierarchies with thinly veiled contempt.
Labor and Exploitation
The labor question is where the colonial parallel becomes most acute. The transmigrators need workers — thousands of them — to build their industrial infrastructure. They recruit locals through a combination of economic incentives and, when necessary, less voluntary mechanisms. They pay wages, which is an improvement over the corvee labor system of the Ming dynasty, but the wages are set by the transmigrators, the working conditions are determined by the transmigrators, and the profits of the labor accrue primarily to the transmigrators' collective enterprise.
Defenders of the transmigrators point out that the working conditions they offer are generally better than what was available under the existing system. Local laborers under the Ming dynasty were subject to corvee obligations, extortion by corrupt officials, and the ever-present threat of famine. Working for the transmigrators at least provides regular meals, medical care, and a degree of physical security. This is true, and it matters. But it is also true that the British colonial administration in India provided famine relief, built hospitals, and introduced legal reforms, while simultaneously extracting enormous wealth from the subcontinent and destroying indigenous industries that competed with British manufactures.
The critical question is not whether the transmigrators are better than the Ming system they are replacing, but whether "better than what came before" is a sufficient ethical standard. By that logic, any imperial power that offers marginal improvements over a predecessor regime is justified in its conquest. The bar is too low. The real question is whether the transmigrators have the right to make these decisions for other people at all, regardless of how good their intentions might be.
How Is Lingao Different?
Having made the case for uncomfortable parallels, it is only fair to examine the ways in which the transmigrators' project genuinely differs from historical colonialism. The differences are real, even if they do not fully resolve the ethical tensions.
First, the transmigrators are not extracting wealth for a distant metropole. British colonialism funneled Indian resources to London. Spanish colonialism shipped American gold and silver to Seville. The transmigrators, by contrast, are building in place. Their industrial infrastructure exists on Hainan, not in some far-off homeland. The wealth they create stays in the local economy, at least in part. They are settlers, not extractors — more analogous to the American colonists than to the East India Company, though that comparison brings its own troubled associations.
Second, the transmigrators share a cultural and ethnic identity with the local population. They speak the same language (with adjustments for historical dialect), practice the same basic cultural customs, and look the same. This eliminates the racial hierarchy that was fundamental to most historical colonialism. There is no "civilized race" and "savage race" in the Lingao framework, no biological essentialism to justify permanent inequality. The transmigrators' superiority is technological and educational, not racial, and in principle it can be shared and transferred.
Third, and most importantly, the transmigrators' explicit long-term goal is to uplift the local population, not to keep it subordinate. They invest heavily in education, training local people to operate and eventually design industrial equipment. They build schools, train medical workers, and create opportunities for talented locals to advance within their system. The endgame, at least as articulated by the more idealistic transmigrators, is a society where the distinction between time-traveler and local person eventually disappears.
This last point is crucial, but it also deserves skepticism. Many colonial powers claimed that their ultimate goal was to prepare colonized peoples for self-governance. The British in India spoke of gradually training Indians for self-rule — someday, eventually, when they were "ready." That someday never quite arrived until it was forced by the independence movement. The gap between stated ideals and actual practice is a persistent feature of colonial history, and there is no reason to assume that the transmigrators of Lingao would be immune to the corrupting effects of power and privilege.
The Novel's Own Engagement
One of Illumine Lingao's genuine strengths is that it does not entirely shy away from these questions. The novel includes characters who voice concerns about the ethics of their enterprise. There are transmigrators who feel uncomfortable with the power dynamics, who question whether they are becoming the very thing they would have condemned in a history textbook. These voices are not always heeded — the pressures of survival and the momentum of the industrial project tend to override ethical qualms — but they are present, and they give the reader permission to think critically about what is happening.
The novel also shows the costs of the transmigrators' project in human terms. Local communities are disrupted. Traditional ways of life are displaced. People who were self-sufficient farmers become wage laborers dependent on an industrial system they do not control. Families are separated as workers relocate to new industrial sites. The social fabric of villages that have existed for generations is torn and rewoven into unfamiliar patterns. These are not merely side effects; they are the direct and predictable consequences of rapid industrialization, consequences that every society that has undergone this process has experienced.
The reader community's debate about these issues is itself fascinating. Chinese readers bring their own complex relationship with colonialism to the discussion. China was never fully colonized in the way India or Africa was, but it was subjected to what historians call "semi-colonialism" — unequal treaties, foreign concessions, extraterritorial privileges — during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This history makes Chinese readers particularly sensitive to the dynamics of technological superiority and foreign intervention, even when the "foreigners" in question are fellow Chinese from the future.
The Question That Won't Go Away
Ultimately, the comparison between Lingao and real colonialism resists easy resolution because it touches on a fundamental tension in how we think about progress itself. Is it possible to bring rapid technological and social change to a traditional society without doing violence to that society's autonomy and self-determination? Is the improvement of material conditions sufficient justification for overriding people's right to choose their own path? If you know that a community's traditional practices will lead to famine, disease, and conquest by other powers, do you have the right — or even the obligation — to intervene, even against their will?
These are not hypothetical questions. They are the questions that every development organization, every humanitarian intervention, and every modernization program in the real world continues to grapple with. The transmigrators of Illumine Lingao face them in an extreme and dramatized form, but the underlying dilemmas are ones that our own world has never satisfactorily resolved.
The novel's greatest contribution to this debate may simply be that it forces the reader to confront it. By making the protagonists sympathetic, knowledgeable, and well-intentioned, and then placing them in a situation where their actions structurally resemble colonialism, the novel denies the reader the comfort of easy answers. You cannot simply condemn the transmigrators as imperialists, because you understand their motives and share many of their values. But you also cannot simply celebrate them as liberators, because you can see the power dynamics and the erasure of local agency that their project entails.
That discomfort is, perhaps, the most valuable thing the novel offers. It is the discomfort of recognizing that progress and domination are not always easy to distinguish, that the road to a better future can look remarkably like the road to empire, and that good intentions are not, by themselves, enough to ensure good outcomes. These are lessons that history teaches repeatedly, and Illumine Lingao, for all its entertainment value, teaches them too.