China is ascendant; everyone is happy and doing great, and the new age of Chinese prosperity is underway, on the steady march to become the world leader.
But one group of people living around Beijing discover that they seem to be only ones to remember the events that occurred during one specific month; a month of heavy political crises, leadership upheaval, uprisings, riots and general chaos.
Together they manage to capture a member of the CCP politburo, so they can get some answers. But the answers are not what they expect…
This book is, for the most part, slow-moving and full of very tedious exposition. I would like to believe this was because a lot of the cultural significance was lost in translation; nevertheless, I had a tough time trying to stay focused on the story.
The action was patchy, and the story line was convoluted. The author tried to follow the stories of several characters, which initially seem unrelated, but later intersect at various points. This angle just seemed like forced coincidence. At the end, it just boiled down to one very very long monologue, which explains and connects all the various unrelated branches of the story.
It seemed crafted specifically to irritate the CCP and score with the small dissenting underground. The claim was this is China’s 1984. I beg to differ. 1984 is a masterpiece. This is just lazy, pretentious writing.