I’ve been curious about the book because i saw some people talking about it, another urge after the netflix show, so went to check a little the book.

I haven’t read much about chinese revolution, so i became intrigued, the cultural revolution was really like that or it was exaggerated?

i sometimes watch a guy that lives on china, he says the current standing of the people today is that thr cr was a mistake because it destroyed many historical artifacts.

well, the post became more about the cultural revolution than the scifi piece itself.

  • GreatSquare@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    Netflix show was not on the level of the books or the Chinese TV series.

    CR was used basically to demonize China in the Netflix version. In the same way, the character Ye Wenjie is just reduced to a psychotic villain who just wants humans wiped out.

    • Cottenlai_Zhou [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      The CR scenes in the show are taken almost directly from the books, in some cases literally word-for-word.

      Liu demonizes the CR because he had a really shit time during that period. Netflix just copied what he wrote.

        • Cottenlai_Zhou [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          From the English version post-script:

          My parents weren’t with me because they were working at a coal mine more than a thousand kilometers away, in Shanxi Province. A few years earlier, when I had been even younger, the mine had been a combat zone for the factional civil wars of the Cultural Revolution. I remembered gunshots in the middle of the night, trucks passing in the street, filled with men clutching guns and wearing red armbands.… But I had been too young back then, and I can’t be sure whether these images are real memories, or mirages constructed later. However, I know one thing for certain: Because the mine was too unsafe and my parents had been impacted by the Cultural Revolution, they had had no choice but to send me to my ancestral home village in Henan. By the time I saw Dongfanghong I, I had already lived there for more than three years.

          Regardless of whether his memories are “real” or invented, he clearly had a negative personal experience of the period.