I read it around two years ago. To me, the worst problem was that the characters seemed to have zero importance, the protagonist was almost nonexistent as a character, and the one I found more interesting and charismatic (Da Shi, the policeman) didn’t amount to much in the end. I’ve read even the novel’s most ardent defenders here in Reddit agree to that.

Basically, almost every single later work featuring an organisation that does time travel is just doing variations on End of Eternity.