It is from the perspective of the comatose [Dai Wei] that the reader is carried through the events leading up to the massacre as well as through the ensuing years of Dai Wei's life in the care of his mother in a rapidly modernizing Beijing.

Kicked, interrogated and terrorized by a police officer, Dai Wei is made to confess every conceivable crime he has committed in his teenage existence in a written self-criticism. "I'd killed a chicken with a slingshot, and ran away. The victim was a female chicken. I'd also smashed a window. The only victim of this incident was a window pane."

This is Dai Wei's first taste of state brutality but it certainly would not be his last. Beijing Coma largely charts the rise and fall of a generation of idealists whose pinnacle of achievement was their failed attempt at overthrowing the communist state authorities in Beijing in 1989.