Story: 2.5 / 10
Characters: 4
Setting: 6
Prose: 3.5

Themes: Communism, Politics, Civilizations, Culture, Customs ( )

Bravo, Lao She! I'm only sorry that your idealism and integrity caused you to be tortured, and pushed you to take your own life.
Once I knew that this was a satire in Chinese life in the 30s, I couldn't help to see each situation as making fun of Chinese and the beginning of communism and the whole madness of Mao Zedong.
My fave quotes:
--"This was a good example of Cat Country logic: the ableist people ought to receive the lowest Rewards" (p.54).
--"the cat people were not accustomed to helping in anything that might be beneficial to someone else, even if that help only cost them a few words" (p.61).
--"anyway, I thought to myself, the cat people seem to consider Mutual plunder an entirely reasonable form of behavior, so why should I interfere?"(p.66).
--"You see, the victims of all this drum playing we're not exactly Angels themselves. None of those who were hindmost were willing to stay at the back, and would push, kick, crowd and even bite you in order to make their way in the world and become foremost. Those who were already foremost, on the other hand, kicked back with their heels, poked back with their elbows and leaned back hard in order to keep the hindmost in their proper place" (p.75).
--"Consequently, those who ought to have been killed were not; and those who ought to have been spared, on the contrary, lost their lives. The ones who were to have been killed but weren't, wormed their way into the Everybody SharesSchyism brawl and started corrupting it with Wiley schemes from within" (p.162). ( )

Not so much science fiction than a deeply troubling and savage account of certain periods of Chinese history, and a very good swipe at our 'modern' civilisation today. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3256057.html

My old friend Rana Mitter recommended this to me as an early example of the Chinese science fiction tradition which we're now seeing in the works of Cixin Liu and Hao Jingfang (and others, but those are the recent Hugo winners). It's a short read, a very very direct satire on China of the 1930s, portrayed as a country on the planet Mars inhabited by cat people. The narrator is an earthling who arrives in a crashed spaceship just before the story begins and gets away slightly murkily as it ends. I thought it was really interesting to note that the trope of people going to Mars and encountering talking non-humans was already well enough established for a Chinese writer writing in Chinese in 1930s China to just pick it up and run with it. The works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were circulating in translation, but neither of them has humans landing on Mars.

The satire is so direct that I wondered if Pierre Boulle might have been partly inspired by this for Monkey Planet/Planet of the Apes. The dates however don't seem to check out - according to ISFDB, Cat Country seems to have been translated into English only in 1970, and to French only in 1981, too late for Boulle's book which was published in 1963. Our unnamed protagonist comes to terms with a fragmented Cat Country, full of weak patriarchal local warlords who are exploited by rich and cynical foreigners, and undermined by subversive students who follow the philosophy taught by Uncle Karl which led to the overthrow of the emperor in the neighbouring country. As satire goes, it's not all that subtle. But it's effectively written, and I found William A. Lyell's translation lucid. ( )

A very rude satire of Chinese culture. It reads like a laowai's rant: why are people so loud here? Why are people always in the way and never make room for you on the sidewalk? Why are people so politically indifferent? Why are they so self-absorbed and money-obsessed?

It's very funny at times, and sometimes very dark. The writing is clear but occasionally a little too bald. It's not so much a story or a novel as it is a series of fictionalized essays mocking/bemoaning a country and a culture. ( )