"When the People Fell" is a science fiction short story by American writer Cordwainer Smith, set in his "Instrumentality" universe.

The story recounts, in "flashback" form—an interview between a reporter and a crusty old-timer—a risky attempt by a future Chinese government to claim and settle the planet Venus, at a time when China is the only ethnic nation on Earth which has survived as a separate entity through a global nuclear war and a long dark age which followed.

Confining them is useless (they drift back) and killing them produces a deadly explosion that contaminates a thousand acres (4 km²).

The ruler of Goonhogo (the entity that replaced China under the early Instrumentality) decrees that 82 million Chinesians (men, women, and children) be dropped from space, parachuting down to the surface.

[2] All of the story texts in this collection and its companion We, The Underpeople are derived from the revised and corrected NESFA Press editions of Smith's work in the 1990s.