The Telling by Ursula LeGuin

This is the sixth and last novel set in the Hainish cycle, although Ursula LeGuin said that she never intended to write a cycle; that it just happened. The novel is written about 30 years after the last Hainish novel was published and few years before Mrs. LeGuin's death. LeGuin is famous for the "soft" science fiction she writes.  The focus is not on technology, science or exploration, but on the inter-person relationships, community dynamics and tradition. Many of her science fiction novels are parables for the treatment of indigineous groups here, on planet Earth, by the colonizing powers, like for example in "The Word for the World is Forest". 

"The Telling" is pretty much a straight-forward critique of the Chinese Communist Party, the Cultural Revolution in Communist China and the overall contemporary social order and priorities of Communist China.  It starts on the "planet" Aka, with one main continent and a capital in the city of Dovza, which is a stand-in for Peking/Beijing including a huge square in the middle (Tiananmen) where horrible execustions have happened.

The Dovzan government, which calls itself "The Corporation" and its citizens "consumer-producers" is hell-bent on modernizing their society so they can catch up with the Hainish and the other advanced races of the Ekumen. To this purpose they destroyed all of their traditional culture, burned all the traditional books, murdered or imprisoned the sages of traditional wisdom called 'maz'. The Dovzan Corporation allows only culture that directly supports the Corporation and its project "Road to the Stars" while everything else is suppressed or destroyed.

The protagonist, Sutty, is a lesbian Indian woman from Terra (Earth), which grew up during a period of counter-revolution against the Ekumen and the Hainish where religious extremists and terrorists called "The Unists" took over the entire planet and murdered most scientists and free thinking people in the name of their "God".  Sutty studies in a Vancouver Hainish University within the "Pale" of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is under the direct protection of the Hainish, so she is largely sparred the religious terrorism and horror of the Unists, but her partner is murdered during a terrorist attack on the Vancouver Library district. 

She is sent as a Hainish/Ekumen representative to Aka, but because in LeGuin's Hainish universe there is no faster than light travel (only NAFAL - Nearly As Fast As Light), it takes about 65 years in real time for her to arrive, while in her subjective time only a few months pass.  During this time the Dovzan Corporation has taken over Aka in a violent revolution and proceeded to murder everyone that is even slightly opposed to its principles, while The Unist Government on Earth has been overthrown with the help of an emissary from the Hainish (originally Terran) which the "fathers" of The Unists proclaim to be "God".

Sutty travels to the last part of Aka where traidtional knowledge is kept called Ozkat-Okzat, which is a stand-in for Communist Chinese-occupied Tibet, where she meets the surviving maz and is introduced to their traditional knowledge.  The entire time she is closely followed and surveilled by Dovzan Corporation agents, the top being "The Monitor" who tries to prevent her from hearing any authentic stories from the indigenous people of Ozkat-Okzat. Eventually Sutty learns the horrible truth about brutal murders of the Monitor's grandparents by the Government (orchestrated by his own father) that made him a broken man, with only path to blindly propagate the programming of the Corporation.  This mirrors the happenings in Communist China, especially during the (Un)Cultural Revolution where children were betraying their own parents to the Government and having them imprisoned or even executed. 

The book ends with Sutty collecting all the traditional knowledge and books of Aka from the maz of Ozkat-Okzat and sending them to the Ekumen where they are to be preserved until the inevitable fall and destruction of the Corporation of Dovza and return to the traditional values on Aka. 

This is a much slower book than the previous ones in the Hainish Cycle, without much action or fighting, but the detail and attention with which the Aka societies are described makes them a living, breathing entity, on par with any real society on Earth.