My partner keeps trying to read it and they keep stopping and reading me passages and then looking up actual historical fact and going wtf, this book is nonsense? Does it get better?
I don't know I haven't read it. I told them I'd ask here. Does it get better? Is it anti communist propaganda or is the ridiculous anti communist screed that starts this book serious off just setup for something better?
Thanks for all the good answers I showed them the whole thread and they said a lot of what you all said is in line with their understanding. So basically the first bit is a caricature of the bad parts of early Chinese communism and then that gets better but it turns misogynist instead. Fun series. They'll continue to read because we have a lot of family and friends who LOVE the book and they want to understand why but it's helpful to have the lens on it
The story does not really give a clear position on if the author support the USSR or any communist ideas. The tropes used describing the post-soviet state can be find in lightning balls too, but all the descriptions used are just normal talking point in Chinese mainstream media in the 90s as we watched USSR collapses, the Chechen Wars and the collapse of Yugoslavian state.
It has more to do with nationalism than actual any ideas of progressivism.
There is an interview on YouTube where the author gave an interview in the US about what he thought of Musk in which he said ''seeing there are still people like him gives him hope for humanity." There were also some statements about the nihilism and the hopelessness of his book in which basically saying there is no stopping to the mechanism of the world, progress. the fact that millions or billions of people have to die and we feel sad about it is just an opinion we express about reality which is inevitable.