“Why don’t you Chinese hate your government as much as we think you ought to?”
The question reveals more about the asker than the asked. The modern Chinese party-state is a notorious violator of human rights — censorship, Tiananmen, Tibet, Xinjiang. Any thinking person can enumerate the crimes. But the question assumes that these crimes should produce the same response in Chinese citizens that they would produce in Americans. They don’t. And the reason is not brainwashing.
The Two Nightmares
When Americans create their movie villains, they create Hitler and the SS again and again: Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers. The fear of the liberty-loving American is of a surfeit of authoritarianism.
The Chinese nightmare is of chaos — of an absence of authority.
China suffered for over a century the predations of imperial powers. Liberalism never took hold because Chinese intellectuals — watching their civilization dismembered — concluded that sovereignty, unity, and the means to preserve both were more important than the franchise. By the mid-1920s, the overwhelming majority of Chinese intellectuals believed that an authoritarian solution was China’s only recourse. Not because they were stupid or servile, but because they had watched what chaos does to a civilization without a strong center.
This is the strong gods debate from the Chinese side. The West’s post-war project dissolved strong bonds to prevent tyranny. China’s modern project strengthened them to prevent chaos. Both are rational responses to different historical traumas — and both have characteristic failure modes.
Performance Legitimacy
The implicit bargain: “You stay out of politics, we’ll create conditions in which you can prosper and enjoy many personal freedoms.” This has been, on balance and to date, a success. China’s economic model lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Most Chinese are pragmatic and utilitarian — the good (prosperity, material comfort, sovereign dignity) and the bad (censored internet, jailed dissidents, pollution) go on the scales.
No thinking Chinese person believes the Party is infallible. Most are quite cynical about official venality, hidden factional struggles, and the instinct for self-preservation. They don’t shrink from criticizing it. But they don’t bandy words like “revolution” about casually. They tend to have a sober appreciation for what’s at stake, for the price that would have to be paid. They support reform, not revolution.
This is Hirschman in the Chinese context: voice operates within the system (complaints, cynicism, pressure for reform), but exit from the system itself (revolution) is rejected because the cost is understood from lived history. The ten commandments of harmony are the family version; here is the national version — compliance purchased not through naivety but through a clear-eyed calculation that the alternative is worse.
The Anglophone Media Lens
A very small number of individuals — reporters for major outlets posted to China, plus their editors — wield tremendous influence over how China is perceived by ordinary Anglophone consumers.
These reporters are subjected to shabby treatment: denied access by ministries, visa threats, roughing-up by plainclothes cops, surveillance, harassment. It seems natural that this treatment would beget less than rosy coverage — and negative coverage begets more nasty treatment, in an un-virtuous circle.
The general impression is that Anglophone media is pro-dissident, so dissidents go on record with Anglophone reporters. This creates a priesthood feedback loop: the sources confirm the narrative, the narrative selects the sources. Civil unrest in China is taken as proof of fundamental fragility, while civil unrest in the US draws on “an inexhaustible reservoir of unexamined faith in the self-corrective mechanisms of American democracy.”
There is a tendency to view China as a monolith — as if decisions by local officials were made in Beijing. It would be as silly as headlining a Kentucky school board banning evolution as “US Bans Teaching of Evolution.”
The Family Metaphor
External criticism of a leadership tends to reinforce citizens’ identification with the state. Most people who bitch about their own parents get awfully defensive when outsiders offer unsolicited criticism. This seems especially true with mothers.
The Chinese family system produces people who have complicated relationships with authority — they see its flaws clearly but resist outside attacks on it. The letter to parents captures this dynamic at the personal level: I can criticize my parents for not understanding me, but if you — an outsider — criticize them, I will defend them because the criticism threatens something that, however imperfect, is mine.
The Hubris Question
Is Beijing so wrong, looking at the smoldering wreckage of Libya and Syria, at the mess that Egypt remains, to want to avoid that outcome at whatever price?
What we’ve taken as the norm — liberal, secular, democratic, capitalistic — is truly exceptional, recent, rare, fragile, and quite contingent. A lot of unexamined hubris lies behind the belief that all people under authoritarian systems should make monumental sacrifices to create liberal democracies — and behind the belief that it can work at all, given the decidedly poor record of such projects in recent years.
America’s own history of IP theft, slavery, indigenous genocide, and McCarthyism — all carried out within a nominally liberal democratic framework — should temper the confidence with which Americans judge other systems. The selective narrative applies: the story Americans tell about China is curated to confirm that liberal democracy is the natural end-state of all civilizations, and any evidence to the contrary is dismissed as transitional.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “Chinese people are brainwashed — they just don’t know what freedom is.”
The midwit take is “they support the government because they’re prosperous — wait until the economy fails.”
The better take is that Chinese support for their government is rational, conditional, and rooted in a different historical trauma than the one that shaped Western democracy. The American who cannot understand why a Chinese person tolerates censorship is making the same error as the Chinese person who cannot understand why Americans tolerate school shootings — each is applying their own nightmare to the other’s reality. Neither nightmare is wrong. They are just different wounds producing different tolerances.
Main Payoff
The values gap is not a knowledge gap. It is not that Chinese people do not know what their government does. They know. They weigh it against what they know of the alternative — and the alternative, seen through a century of humiliation, civil war, famine, and the Cultural Revolution, is not abstract political theory but concrete historical memory of what happens when the center does not hold.
The question is not “why don’t Chinese people hate their government?” The question is: what would you tolerate to avoid your worst nightmare?
References: