Books

Chinese people presumably know what the cultural revolution was about and the subtext is ingrained in social memory. To an English reader with no knowledge of what the cultural revolution was about the books opening has zero context. It begins with a revolutionary girl getting killed and some people lining up to denounce math and science like a public humiliation court but more violent. Theres no subtext as to why these things are happening or what its about. A quick Wikipedia article fixes that context up of it being about the current regime believing academic knowledge would undermine political power and economic worker capability, but thats never explained in the book its expected implicit knowledge your expected to know going in.

Western atrocities and cultural revolutions usually aren't over literal knowledge. For English speakering countries all revolutions and dictatorship genocides are usually about persecution of nationality, race, or religion. Take the american civil war and the Holocaust to example. revolution and state sanctioned violence aren't usually directly over nerd shit like knowledge, theyre fought over ideaology, race, resources. Instead of directly spilling blood and literally burning libraries governments prefer to play the long game of defunding public education and quietly banning controversial books to make the populace stupid and submissive, not literally book burning. 1984 is supposed to be metaphorical extremist dystopian satire warning us about PRISM, five eyes and the survailance state, not a literal instruction manual.

The idea of a book burning society with extreme censorship in such an in-your-face way is presented as fictional because the concept is so ridiculous. No half-stable government in their right mind would be so violently audacious over something so trivial, not even the run of the mill dictatorships. Asian culture is just very different.