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On a clear day, they say, the 34-metre Tian Tan Buddha on Lantau Island can be seen from Macau. It is the world’s largest sitting outdoor Buddha, weighing 250 tonnes and built from 202 bronze pieces.

It’s an impressive piece of engineering by the Chinese military-industrial complex, specifically Nanjing-based aerospace unit Liming, which makes China’s intercontinental ballistic missiles and much else besides.

Lijia Zhang, one of the more than 10,000 employees of Liming, likes the irony, which alas may be lost on many readers, coming as it does late in the overly-long Socialism is Great – A Worker’s Memoir of the New China.

Zhang, who co-authored China Remembers (1999), a 50th anniversary story about the People’s Republic of China told through interviews with 30 people, has a flair for getting into the lives of those around her. Socialism is Great is populated with many interesting characters, not least her own.

She tells the not often heard story of what it was like to be a worker in China’s state-owned “iron rice bowl” economy at the start of the reform era ushered in by Deng Xiaoping in 1980, and of how she escaped a factory-fodder fate of forever testing pressure gauges to join the quickening currents of change that led to Tiananmen in June 1989.

Zhang’s writing is sometimes self-conscious, but bits of Socialism is Great are nice, best when evoking a sense of time and place and circumstance.

Central are her long-suffering mother, her “useless” father and the shame attached to his being snagged in Mao Zedong’s early purges of dissent, her workmates who are variously invested in the Communist status quo, and the lovers who replaced Mao in her young pioneer’s heart as she becomes aware of her powerlessness in the face of the Party.

But Zhang’s is a digressive style, one that should have been tempered by a firm editorial hand because it undermines what could have been a very good book. She can’t resist the urge to bury perfectly good sentences and paragraphs under mounds of historical detail and emotional minutia.

Socialism is Good – the title comes from a song served up by the Party, its lie being that “In socialist countries, the people enjoy high social standing.”

Zhang makes effective use of prevailing propaganda. “‘Revolution is not a dinner party,’ our great leader Chairman Mao once warned. But today’s revolution seemed to be all about dinner parties – most business deals, official or private, were concluded at a banquet table crowed with expensive items – shark-fin or turtle soup, and drinks with medicinal benefits like bear-paw wine (considered generally good), snake-penis wine (a manhood enhancer) or snake-gallbladder wine (for improving eyesight).”

Anyone who knows anything about China, or has read any of the contemporary writers, will find first hundred-or-so pages hard going and tailored for the ignorant –Americans coming for the Olympics, perhaps.

Stealing a kiss under the pine trees at Nanjing’s Confucian Temple, the reader learns it is “the Bethlehem of ancient China”, that it is similar in style to the Forbidden City, and that the essence of Confucianism “is obedience, respect, selflessness, and working for the common good”.

The reader also gets some throwaway lines on “anti-bourgeois liberalism campaigns” and “Japanese devils”, with a dose of heresy, that the Communists should be grateful for the Sino-Japanese War because otherwise Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalists would have wiped them out.

This happens a lot in Socialism is Great. The kiss, pages ago, is forgotten, lost in a haze of words and a jumble of ideas.

But all is not lost, because, about halfway through, Zhang finds her voice.

Caught with a married lover, on “an empty beach half-hidden by a bushy Rose of Sharon, beside a pond where lily pads floated dreamily,” in the park at Nanjing’s Xuanwu Lake one hot August night, a wallet emptied of 400 yuan to pay a “fine” buys off the threat of police and scandal.

In recounting the incident, Zhang deftly touches on a vast array of issues, from the elusiveness of love to a prudishly conservative Chinese streak that holds honesty hostage to conformity at all costs – without once giving a lesson on Mao, or the Communist Party of China, or Tang Dynasty poetry.

Zhang is good when she travels light and if she loses some of the cultural baggage, could go a long way.

Tim Cribb