I.  A revelation from tumultuous adolescence

JiLong Rao was born in May 1939 in Hong Kong and raised in Beijing from 1940 onward. At age eleven, he served as chairman of the International Children’s Day celebrations in Wuhan on June 1, 1950, and remained a principal organizer of youth activities in the city until age seventeen. During his sophomore year at university, the Chinese Communist Party labeled him an anti-party and anti-socialist “rightist,” leading to forced labor in jungles and coal mines from 1957 to 1960.

     After seven years as an influential student leader, he was suddenly thrust into an abyss of hardship. Efforts once devoted to national revitalization became evidence of alleged crimes. Yet, over the ensuing years, this ordeal—while profoundly painful—gradually liberated him from earlier confusion, grief, and indignation, launching a lifelong pursuit of observation and introspection into the cultural distortions that most gravely endanger human civilization.

II. The awakening of life triggered by Entropy

In autumn 1960, having been assigned to Tibet, Rao was unexpectedly recruited by the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) to the Department of Geochemistry and Rare Elements, where he worked under close party control. In 1979, Science Press published his Thermodynamics in Geochemistry (448,000 words) in Beijing—a work composed in secret during the Cultural Revolution that attracted widespread attention in China following the era’s end.

     He developed a theoretical framework for geological processes and the natural environment grounded in his reverence for thermodynamic austere beauty. Schrödinger’s insight—that life counters entropy’s natural increase through negentropy maintained by self-discipline—resonated profoundly, aligning with his childhood engagement with Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi and his later study of Stoicism. This synthesis of science, philosophy, and lived hardship became the foundation of his scholarly career and his approach to adversity.

III. Inner reflection after the mirage disappears

Academic positions included: Professor at USTC (1976–1985); Chairman of the Department of Environmental Science at Qingdao University (1985–1988); Professor at the Beijing Graduate School and Beijing Institute of Management, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1985–1989); and visiting professor at the University of Toronto (1984–1985). He also served as chief scientist for the Chinese side in a France–China joint program on global environmental modeling (1985–1989).

     This era coincided with China’s reopening of the academic title system. For a scholar long treated as a political pariah, publication and international collaboration represented hard-won affirmation of dignity earned through direct confrontation with tyranny. Yet even while leading global modeling initiatives, he remained under strict oversight—a permitted figure in a controlled display. The illusion shattered decisively in summer 1989 with the June Fourth massacre, an event that constituted not only political violence but a profound spiritual assault, demanding unequivocal confrontation for genuine freedom.

IV. An observation and historical reflection of a mature life

From 1990 to 1997, Rao served as a research scientist at Yale University, supported by NSF and DOE grants. He enrolled in Yale Graduate School in 1991, earning his PhD in 1994. He subsequently worked as a developer and architect at IT firms in Boston and California (1997–2009). His research encompassed geochemical cycles, global environmental modeling, thermodynamic applications in earth and environmental sciences, error propagation in geochemical calculations, and elemental abundance in the Earth’s crust.

     As he integrated into American scientific life, he applied the same analytical rigor to emerging social and political phenomena. Naturalization represented a solemn commitment to defend the United States and human civilization against perceived regression toward authoritarian patterns. He developed a marked resistance to ideological manipulation observed in contemporary Western discourse. In his assessment, certain prevailing Western ideologies echo entropic forces that erode civilization internally—patterns he had witnessed firsthand. For over three decades, he communicated these concerns to American political and academic leaders, often with limited response. This book thus emerged as a necessary evolution in form and reach to reiterate the warning.

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