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
This article also has some questionable (racist?) stuff. Like what does he mean by 'Chinese society'?
"Types are central to the way Liu thinks of people; he has a knack for quickly sketching the various classes that make up Chinese society."
Some more:
"Much of the books’ resonance, however, comes from the fact that they also offer a faithful portrait of China’s stringently hierarchical bureaucracy, that labyrinthine product of Communism."
This is the worst offender:
"Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien."
He also talked about a million Uyghur's in re-education camps, the one child policy, and cremation as opposed to burying people in the ground.
damn that internalized orientalism goes hard
Luckily my company got no hierarchies, nor do the parties I can't get into, nor is politics hierarchical.