Dai Wei's comatose state is meant to be a form of resilient protest and resistance to a totalitarian society which enforces a culture of amnesia upon its people, and his persistent remembrance gives a visceral sense of the deeply problematic nature of Chinese society after June Fourth, as one reviewer puts it: "A comatose mind within a terrifyingly vigorous body is the analogy for post-Tiananmen China that emerges from Ma's book." This might be the other meaning of the title Beijing Coma.