It's really hard to feel motivation to do anything in life when you basically know things are going to get far, far worse before they get better
It's difficult to defeat the overwhelming feeling of "There is no future (Or at least not a good one), so what's the point?". I feel like even if I live to 100 we're not going to be anywhere close to a Star Trek utopia, but more smack dab in the middle of a Dark Age.
"Forced by the Nationalist Army to leave behind his family, he witnesses the horrors and privations of the Civil War, only to return years later to face a string of hardships brought on by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution."
"In these books, we can understand the harm of the Cultural Revolution to human nature and clearly understand the mistakes made during the Cultural Revolution."
This makes the author seem like an anticommunist, would you say this is true?
No, the author is not an anticommunist. This book would not be so widely promoted in China if it were anticommunist. His depictions of the cultural revolution are focused on the suffering people went through in a neutral way. I don’t think it’s controversial in China to say that there were issues with the cultural revolution that led to suffering for some. Here’s an official narrative to summarize the cultural revolution on Chinese internet:
The full name of the Cultural Revolution is the “Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, which took place from May 1966 to October 1976. It was a civil unrest that was wrongly launched by leaders and used by counter-revolutionary groups to bring serious disasters to the Party, the country and the people of all ethnic groups, leaving an extremely painful lesson.