On the wooden characters. I subscribe to this point of view. Initially, I thought it was just the inability of the writer to write convincing motivations but the more I read it dawned on me that there is a serious socialist propaganda undertone in his brush when it comes to the Chinese characters and plots. Motivations are off and the discourse is as unbelievable as to make the characters seem like pure fantasy and not of the good kind. My opinion is that either he is hopelessly unable to escape the propaganda tone (with a serious reek of Young Guards) or he deliberately wrote (or rewrote) the offending parts to make the material more palatable to the censorship apparatus. The western characters in the novel are even worse. High notes on the scifi, abysmal on the human milieu.
> unable to escape the propaganda tone (with a serious reek of Young Guards)
We're still talking about the guy whose book opens on a bortherly civil war between two Young Guards factions, followed by a public lynching by the same guards, and a young girl ending in a re-education camp? An opening that has been damaging enough by Chinese censors to be moved a few chapters later in the Chinese edition of the book?
Yes, same guy. Please keep in mind that the rules on what reality is acceptable or not come down from Minitrue and they may change without prior warning. Look, I am speculating here as to the motives but the words, the phrases, the intonations, they all ring true in my ears. His characters sound and walk and talk as if they are copied down from the pages of Pravda, I kid you not.
Have you read it in Chinese? Or are you projecting your impressions of the USSR on 3BP? Have you thought that what rings to you like “authoritarian communist China” may just be “authoritarian for centuries China”?
For all I know you may be right on the writer, but judging the translated work of a guy from a country half a world away from your clichés on another country (I will assume you neither lived in nor speak/read the language) sounds a bit like a stretch to me.
