Comment by nonameiguess
13 hours ago
This rings poignant now that I finally got around to reading The Three-Body Problem. It starts off depicting struggle sessions during the cultural revolution in China in the 60s, in which they're beating a physicist to death for teaching relativity because Einstein gave imperialists the bomb. It's so stupid, that if it was fiction, I wouldn't find it realistic that people would be this stupid.
To be clear, the book is fiction, but struggle sessions and beating physicists to death is not.
Do you have a citation for an actual physicist being beaten to death because of their views on physics or was the book exaggerating for the sake of the plot and promoted widely in the west because it promoted anticommunism?
For what it’s worth I like the show just not that part.
What didn't you like about that part, just the depiction of violence while everyone watched and did nothing?
I'll preface with, I am a communist so I have no anti communist tendencies.
But, that is what struggle sessions were like, and their most frequent locations were in classrooms, and their most frequent targets were teachers and professors. And they'd often drag in random peasants to watch. I remember one quote that was like, feeling bad for these peasants who have no idea wtf is going on or why they're watching some professor get beat half to death.
The CPC's reasons for the struggle sessions were cynically open-eyed: they wanted people to participate so that people were involved and culpable with the state violence against "counter revolutionaries."
This is why the PRC's communist revolution was flawed from the start and doomed to slide into deep authoritarianism, which holds out as a historical fact now.
Btw for what it's worth the book really isn't all that anti communist, or anti CPC at least. Criticism of the cultural revolution is allowed in the PRC now, or the author never would have been allowed to publish.