Semi-relevant anecdote: Back in my first year of university (in the UK), I remember coming back from the Christmas break to find my Chinese flatmate, disheveled. Turns out he had spent the holiday in the library reading up on Tiananmen Square and the like and was very eager to share with me his astonishing discoveries. He was surprised when I told him that people outside of China know about all that stuff. I can't imagine how confused it all must've made him feel, especially since he returned to China after his studies.
I've had several international student friends from China. One of them, when they first arrived, gobble up all the information that was censored in China. E.g. taiwan, tiananmen, tibet, etc. And now hates the Communist party to the guts. Then there is another one who said Tiananmen was unfortunate... but it was "necessary"; That one also praised Jiang Zemin on modernising the economy, and told me to focus on that instead.
I have. Like how their government lies about the air quality index, but when you check the index as generated by any other country's embassy you get a much higher number. How the people are taught that smog and unhealthy air is normal, and are afraid to talk about it if you bring it up. Or how major world events don't hit the papers, and if they do are given massive spin. Or how huge swaths of the internet are blocked. I used to live on an international floor in college, and when one of the Chinese students came here and went to the library, he said he read Chinese history and cried because it was so much different from what he'd be taught.
Most Chinese abroad (that I meet, might be biased of course) seem to be students on a sort of foreign scholarship from the Chinese state. And they are terrified of the consequences of discussing this. Probably for exactly that reason.
A few months after a Chinese friend of mine came to the US in 2004 I asked him about some things like Taiwan, voting in China, and the free movement of people within China. The answers he gave me sounded like straight up propaganda (e.g. Taiwan is just a problem caused by the US government).
About a year later I asked him some of the same questions and his answers were completely different. I think he had come to realize that in the US he could say whatever he wanted without worrying. It was rather eye-opening.
During my stay at various research institutes throughout Europe where I met a lot of Chinese PhD students and Researchers, it was surprising to know that many of these highly educated intelligent people didn’t see anything wrong with Chinese leadership. And insisted Tibet is theirs and Hong Kong is part of China. I was really shocked at first but a friend from Hong Kong explained me that many Chinese are highly patriotic and brainwashed from Chinese media to distrust western media. And anything bad western media says about china they think it’s all false.
I'm Chinese, and I've a lot of Chinese friends, and from my experience I'd say your friend actually changed his mind, as opposed to simply realizing he could speak freely.
There is an absolute dearth of real factual information on issues like Taiwan, democracy, and free movement within China , and practically everything comes from the government. The people generally distrust what the government tells them, but a lifetime of propaganda and misinformation takes it toll anyways - it's entirely likely your friend believed every word of what he said before.
I know many other Chinese who stubbornly refuse to face the facts even after they leave China, and are presented with a smorgasbord of verifiable, authentic facts. I know some who still continue to dismiss all of this as American propaganda - some people can't be helped.
I'm glad to see that your friend at least was able to figure things out for himself, instead of falling back to the bad Chinese habit of taking every criticism of the government as a grave insult to their race, and feeling the knee-jerk need to defend.
I lived in China for 3 years and speak pretty decent Mandarin. I'm really grateful people are doing analyses like this, but, and I am very sad to say this, I think it may not matter because very few people want to discuss anything subversive anyway.
Recently I tried to engage with my oldest Chinese friend about the Sesame Credit system that I think will gradually be adapted to compel more and more obedience. It was like water off a duck's back. As far as she was concerned, the government's description was the end of the story.
Anecdote, of course, but I can't do a real survey. My feeling is that I could try all day (speaking very frankly on WeChat) to get Chinese friends to at least understand my concerns and I'd just get blown off 20 different ways. I hope I'm wrong, that it's just my limited experience that makes the situation seem gloomier than it really is.
I think this is an example of the kind of armchair international relations pareidolia that shaves off much of the nuance of the real world. It tends to be mixed with main character syndrome.
It reminds me of a friend I knew who was terrified that the Chinese would search all his belongings and files once he landed in Beijing. Of course, once he got there he soon realized most people did not give a shit about what a random foreigner was up to
The same thing happened to me when talking to friends of me who are exchange students from china (i am from central europe).
They were extremely smart but they could not understand political activism or why anyone would ever engage in that let alone be interested in politics. But of course the sample size here is n=2, not really enough to draw conclusions at all.
Their sense of loyalty and identity is the reason. People are hesitant to absorb information that questions their identity and they're even more hesitant when they feel that that identity is being threatened. Their sense of identity in this case is not just something random but something instilled in them since a young age by the Chinese government. They feel a loyalty to the Chinese government and so are willing to propogandize themselves.
Bear in mind, if you are a Chinese national studying abroad you are probably well off as far as Chinese nationals go. This means that you are probably a strong beneficiary of the current Chinese regime. So you're likely to be very attached to it, unlike people who are not well off or are repressed. Those people probably aren't studying abroad.
Educated Westerners generally know far less about China than educated Chinese people know about the West.
This really shows in conversations about China. Anti-Chinese propaganda has dramatically ratcheted up in the West (it really began during the Trump administration), and since most people know nothing about China to begin with, they basically believe what they're exposed to in the media. People are operating with such a wildly distorted, wacky view of China that it's nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion about the country.
I think a big part of it is that most (recent) mainland expats still mostly consume mainland (i.e. censored) news media and social media, and their friends in their destination country are almost exclusively other mainland expats. Reading and writing Chinese is significantly more comfortable for most expats and mainland Chinese media has cultural appeal for them as well for obvious reasons.
It takes an unusual and frankly relatively rare amount of independent thought and personal research to believe something at odds with a reality that your entire social network accepts as obvious fact. Especially when you start from the same manufactured reality that they did. And I would guess, even among expats, speaking about such doubts of the official CCP line probably is met with significant resistance among other mainlanders as mainlanders tend to be relatively nationalistic (as a product of their censored media and “patriotic education“). Why bother with it then? Which is also a part of contemporary Chinese cultural (no doubt nurtured by the CCP) — politics are is the business of the government, not the governed anyway.
So, in short, there’s a lot of political inertia for mainland expats, not a lot of incentive to consider other views, disincentive to adopt other views, and a lot of work to learn about other views anyway (must be in English in non-work hours, learning a whole alternate history and political philosophy takes a ton of time, your network of Western friends with sufficient knowledge to discuss these topics with is probably amounts to zero). So really, it would almost be more surprising if they were flipping views — even though, personally, I’ve spent significant time learning the CCP canon and find it rather obviously holey.
As a chinese, I'm also amused when Americans are so adamant about something they know so little about. Somehow chinese that have been exposed to both western and chinese media is gonna be more brainwashed than those that only read western sources
I haven’t been to China but I grew up in post communist Europe.
A concept unfamiliar to westerners are “open secrets”. Things that everyone knows, everyone talks about with each other, and never get mentioned in any official capacity. If someone asks with a camera, the answer is whatever it needs to be. If an official asks in the line of duty, the answer is the correct answer. If the same person asks as a friend 3 hours later, you both talk shit.
Kinda like schoolyard rules. We can be fighting to the death to the death but if a teacher asks, we’re best friends having fun together.
Few years ago I talked on people on omegle. Chinese girl pops up. We talk, like many many Chinese, she asks quickly what I think about China.
I grew up fond of Asia: Martial Arts, Bruce Lee, asian food, spiritual ideas, that simplicity in art, architecture, clothing; Japanese culture too.. anyway I was very very positive about her culture.
She responded right away: cool but well you know.. it's not all rose here; with a few mild comments about economy and politics. Then a long silence, followed by panick-ish excuses around the fact that she shouldn't have said this and she disconnected.
Note that this was about the big firewall thing. Surely it didn't help for paranoia. Still it was the first time I ever talked to someone scared about her country as a whole.
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Recently with the growth of international chinese tech brands, some news about raising wages, using robots instead of armies of exploited people .. I thought China would get a stable and peaceful rise. I did not envision this.
How many of the people commenting here read the Chinese-language press? (I mean, publications in the Chinese language from either inside or outside the region where the Communist Party of China exercises prior restraint on publication.) The one thing I've learned from studying the language, history, and culture of China since 1975 is that almost everyone who doesn't know the language is full of crazy ideas about China, even if they live there.
I have a Chinese coworker -- fairly young. He's an awesome guy, we hit it off very quickly and ended up sharing a lot of interests. One of the things that we settled on early was that, if nothing else, the people of the world can agree on at least one thing: a dislike and distrust of politicians/elite leaders. He wasn't foaming-at-the-mouth angry or anything, but he also wasn't fawning. Fawning over China as a cultural entity, yes, but we were able to have a good number of fairly frank discussions.
Of course, there are still topics that felt totally taboo in such half-personal/half-professional relationships; Hong Kong was a sticking point that we avoided, for instance, and I never would have dreamed of bringing up Tiananmen.
My 95% was an educated guess, it could well be 90%. But I would be shocked if it were any lower than that.
> I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.
I know many as well, but there's major selection bias at work here, in that if you 1) met them abroad, 2) spoke to them in English about 3) a highly sensitive subject, they are highly likely to be one of the 5%.
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