It's always hilarious introducing stories (in general, not just SF) from another culture to people outside that culture. You hardly ever get someone who pauses to think about how weird their own stories may seem to outsiders. And nobody ever seems to grok that other nations' people might have pride in their own nation. So to American eyes, American patriotism is natural and normal but Chinese patriotism is obviously the product of propaganda, or as in the story mentioned at the beginning of this article, that a North Korean writer may actually want to write good things about their own country, even if the patriotism is aspirational, say, instead of saying what it is now.
First off the concept, as introduced on the back of the book, or in book-yakking circles (like this) or such must be something that interests me in some way. This means that if the books seems too political in focus ("left" or "right"), for example, I don't engage. That's not what I read SF books for.
Second, if the concept intrigues, I have to get a hint that it isn't just a rehashing of something I've already read. I need to read a new take on a concept, not Yet Another Evil Empire Cut Down By Rebels space opera, complete with laser swords, say...
Third, if it gets to this stage, I'll find a free ecopy somewhere and I'll read the first 50 pages in a "try before you buy" thing. The author has to grab my interest in 50 pages, no more. If by page 50 I'm not sufficiently intrigued that I'm willing to shell out money, I don't shell out money. The ebook is deleted and the book is put into my mental "do not enage" bin alongside books whose very concepts don't interest me.
If, however, by page 50 the book intrigues me, I'll start the difficult task of hunting down hardcopy and buy it when I find it.
This is a common error: people import food from other cultures and don't import with it the way it is prepared in that other culture. Then they say "this sucks".
Similar thing happens with even something as basic and trivial as tofu: it's not a meat substitute, and if you try to use it as that it's going to suck. Make it the way it's made in the culture that invented it.
Generally you can assume anybody who uses terms like "sheeple" unironically, or equates human beings with livestock, is a cunt whose opinions can safely be ignored and whose existence can be excised from your digital life with blocks and other such tools.
Use of those tools is also good for your mental health.
Man, all the comments in here about the "boring" songs and poetry … do yourself a favour and don't ever even consider reading works like, oh, I don't know, practically anything by Goethe, Schiller, or Shakespeare. Or from the other side of the world, the novel A Dream of Red Mansions. Or that Indian epic Mahabharata.
I have been beating this drum for years in various platforms (including Lemmy). The absolute inability of (chiefly) Americans to admit even the slightest possibility of error is truly astonishing, it turns out.
At least I get block fodder out of it when I see people unwilling to address anything and just do childish responses.
The main deaths weren't even students. They were protesting WORKERS over a kilometre away. And, in fact, the overall upheaval of 1989 was worker protests that were nationwide. There's a reason why the authorities were so antsy and why they even, at the end, did the dangerous thing of using the PLA against the people: they viewed the events of 1989 leading up to June 4th as an existential threat.
How can there be a hatred of something that doesn't exist? 😲
What's called Artificial "Intelligence" right now is nothing of the sort. At the absolute best they're a bunch of hallucinating digital parrots. They show no comprehension of any kind of the whatever it is they churn out and it takes about 30 seconds to prove it with any of them (yes, even the much-vaunted ChatGPT).
So I don't "hate AI" because it doesn't exist. I hate LLM generative text, though, or its pictorial and audio counterparts.
It's always hilarious introducing stories (in general, not just SF) from another culture to people outside that culture. You hardly ever get someone who pauses to think about how weird their own stories may seem to outsiders. And nobody ever seems to grok that other nations' people might have pride in their own nation. So to American eyes, American patriotism is natural and normal but Chinese patriotism is obviously the product of propaganda, or as in the story mentioned at the beginning of this article, that a North Korean writer may actually want to write good things about their own country, even if the patriotism is aspirational, say, instead of saying what it is now.