From Newsgroup: rec.pets.cats.anecdotes

So I read Lao She's novel the Cat Country, about a Chinese man
who travels to Mars to find himself in a cat country, an atomized
corrupt country whose only crop is a natural drug that functions
as food and tranquilizer. Their are many cute things in this
funny book here with the cat people, like their worship of
foreigners, a national treasury that is entirely funded by sale
of national treasures like museum items and libraries to
foreigners, an imported progressive educational system where
students become graduates on their first day of elementary
school, etc. Ideological convictions had to be divisive and
paper thin as imported slogans about Everybodyovskism and
Markovsky were used for personal power plays. Well, the
foreigners invade an proceed to kill all the cat people, the cat
people who haven't already died in internal conflict, but the
invading army leaves the last two locked in a cage, biting each
other to death. The cat people couldn't defend themselves
because of corruption which left them powerless.

There are also moments from the much shorter serialized original,
City Of Cats, not as funny as the subsequent novel form, but
unfortunately butchered in the English translation, sections
deleted as 'not needed for the intent of the work'; it being good
that at least the translator admitted doing it.

This Cat Country is an actual Chinese novel, written in the
1930s, before the USSR imposed an anti-Chinese government called
the Communist Party Of China which put a ban on Chinese literature
in 1949. The author was killed by the leftist state of which he
supported, in the 1960s. This could be yet another book I read
from an author killed by something they believed in, but did he
really support it, or was that a lie? After all, there's been no
free media in China since 1949, and his supposed support could
have been fabricated, maybe to protect the lives of friends and
relatives in Mao's "backstab republic". One difference between
fiction and grim reality is that the national treasures were not
taken by the invading army but were destroyed by them, as entire
libraries of China were destroyed in Mao's anti-Chinese policy of
"erase the past".


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