However the real value in the book for me was twofold: first, some insight into the way PRC folks think (some mistake it for a bad translation or criticise the way the characters are thinking as "unrealistic" - I would say instead it's often very Chinese); second, this is one of few books depicting information warfare.
On the first I have not much more to say. I've lived in Asia for a while so I recognise some patterns, but I don't speak Mandarin. My understanding of PRC folks is purely based on my interaction with my friends there. Nevertheless based on this I would say that a lot of the ways in which the characters' thinking differs from that of say, those in a Vernon Vinge novel are typically Chinese. In the same vein there is the hilarious dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao although it's hard to pick up a subtitled version (it airs on one of the Australian channels occasionally).
Information warfare is rarely discussed intelligently here for some reason (probably because it is used systematically by a variety of groups that frequent HN and try to minimise its existence and impact, because "those who know stay quiet" and because it is easier to defend from manipulation if the manipulator does not understand you well).
In Liu's books, particularly the first and a little bit in Death's End, it consists of modifying the culture of the enemy so that it is more easily defeated. This is an art as old as humanity; the first formal reference to it in the modern era might be the Potemkin village, and a good introductory book on the Soviet flavour ("Active Measures") is Gen. Oleg Kalugin's biography [1] published after he defected. If you speak French, both books by the anonymous "Lt Col X" [2] (most likely to be a French intelligence officer) are also worth a read.
Taken together with the fact that the book was very successful in China (which is impossible without at least tacit government approval), it presents a possible explanation for the Great Firewall.
In the book, a key plot point is that everything you do is known instantly by the enemy - just like the NSA was shown to be able to do by Snowden. Thus, humans need to learn to hide their actions, letting just enough information leak to other humans for coordination but without tipping their hand to the very smart, omniscient, but less able to lie Trisolarians. Considering the Chinese have a reputation for speaking in parables ("riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" - applicable to the Russians originally but I heard it many times applied to the PRC) there is a direct parallel with a facet of how the authorities and some of the population might view the current top superpower.
In short I guarantee it will be unlike anything you've read this year.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Esp...
[2] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-... - https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-manipulation-2e-revue-au...
> Our station also became deeply involved in what we called “active measures,” which essentially involved dirty tricks and disinformation campaigns. One of the most aggressive campaigns was related to the emerging postcolonial nations of Africa, where the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a struggle for influence. We in the KGB station in New York did everything we could to stir up trouble for the American side.
> One of our dirty tricks involved a nasty letter-writing campaign against African diplomats at the United Nations—an idea cooked up by KGB headquarters in Moscow and approved by the Communist Party Central Committee. Our KGB staff, using new typewriters and wearing gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, typed up hundreds of anonymous hate letters and sent them to dozens of African missions. The letters, purportedly from white supremacists as well as average Americans, were filled with virulent racist diatribes. The African diplomats publicized some of the letters as examples of the racism still rampant in America, and members of the American and foreign press corps quoted from them. I and other KGB officers working as correspondents in the United States reported extensively on this rabidly antiblack letter-writing campaign. I lost no sleep over such dirty tricks, figuring they were just another weapon in the cold war.
> Our active measures campaign did not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or color: we went after everybody. Attempting to show that America was inhospitable to Jews, we wrote anti-Semitic letters to American Jewish leaders. My fellow officers paid American agents to paint swastikas on synagogues in New York and Washington. Our New York station even hired people to desecrate Jewish cemeteries. I, of course, beamed back reports of these misdeeds to my listeners in Moscow, who—tuning in to my broadcasts—no doubt thanked the Lord or Comrade Lenin that they had been born in a socialist paradise, and not in a hotbed of racial tension like the United States of America. [...] I knew our propaganda was exaggerating the extent of racism in America, yet I also saw firsthand the blatant discrimination against blacks. Again, I had no qualms about stirring up as much trouble as possible for the U.S. government. It was all part of the job.
[1] "Spymaster: My Thirty-two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West" - Oleg Kalugin - https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Esp...