You underestimate chinese people. Not everybody is successfully brainwashed and believes everything what chinese media or science tell them. They are extremely critical internally, but would never admit that publicly. Their privacy standards are much higher than in the west for a good reason. They are really spied upon, in a much grander scale. Eg their social media profiles are never with real names, and are invite-only. Facebook or Google realname policies won't fly there.
So independent confirmation from westerners has its value.
On the other hand, a lot of claims about China that are very easy to disprove - even with limited media freedom - are still widely believed in the West.
I'm thinking of two huge examples from recent times:
* The widespread belief that people in China have social credit scores.
* The belief that zero-CoVID was fake, and that CoVID was actually spreading like crazy in China, but was somehow covered up.
These are claims that can be disproven just by knowing people in China and asking them about their lives. Given how many millions of Chinese people live abroad, how many expats live in China, and how many cross-border connections there are in general, it's crazy that so many people still believe the above theories.
There's very little knowledge about China among the Western public, and there's a strong tendency towards conspiratorial interpretations of everything regarding China.
Indeed. The western people have been brainwashed and have absolutely no critical thinking skills on anything related to China. There are only very few that do not blindly accept everything the western media say about China. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i915eArrego
You'd be surprised how incredibly pervasive such views are with the Chinese and also with Chinese emigrants. Being exposed to state media for two decades will do funny stuff to your head it is not that you then move to the West and suddenly you see clearly. I know a few people who went this route and we can talk about many things but some bits are remarkably resilient in the face of having access to more facts.
I'm sure there are people that fit your description but unless you have proof I don't think you should make such accusations.
There are definitely people in China that understand western culture and know how to do imperceptible propaganda. China is a huge country with long and deep ties to the west. It's probably intentional that they put out propaganda that seems naive. It diverts from more subtle programs. Look at TikTok. Does that strike you as not good at manipulating western audiences? My experience with China is that a large majority of people are simple and naive, but there is an elite core that is beyond most of the rest of the world in skills and knowledge, as you allude to.
The problem is you literally cannot trust anything positive that comes out of China. This isn't jingoism, western countries have their own issues, but China is a country set up only for rewarding positive results and severely punishing negative or even neutral results. Having worked from China in numerous jobs, a good chunk of the useful information they have is a liability as it's most likely stolen from elsewhere. To be clear this has absolutely nothing to do with the individual person, but with the risk/reward structure that exists in mainland China.
True, but my point is that no population has a consensus. Whether you live in China or the West, there are people who know the truth and people who don't know the truth. There are people who are well-informed and people who are ignorant.
China has a lot of things that invalidate common knowledge but that doesn't mean it is real, reproducable, or novel. There is a reason why scrutiny exists.
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.
If anything, the idea that either the Chinese population is unhappy and repressed, or that we can't possibly know what they think, that is an assumption. Or rather, an eternal myth perpetuated by undying stereotypes.
It confounds me that people who are not natively Chinese, or have never lived there, or ever used the existing search infrastructure (ex: Baidu) make sweeping claims with such confidence that they truly know what's best for Chinese people.
In truth, I find that most Westerners have a much more distorted view of China than Chinese people do. That may seem strange and obvious to say, but there are so many Westerners who know next to nothing about China, yet confidently talk about Chinese people being brainwashed. The thing is, those "brainwashed" people have a much better informed and more nuanced view of China. The people calling them "brainwashed" are typically just regurgitating whatever they read in the newspaper this morning, which is usually sensationalized (imagine a non-American's impression of the US being formed entirely by news accounts of mass shootings).
the people would only believe what they believe, which exactly describe what you thinking right now. Because you think Chinese has no their own opinion, so they can't express themselves. I don't want to convince you, since I knew you won't believe me as well. Just want to tell you, Chinese is high intelligence human being like you, they are not stupid as you think.
So independent confirmation from westerners has its value.
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