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.

Agree here. In terms of cognitive dissonance, it cuts both ways, think about the systematic elimination of native american tribal lands, slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII, etc.

Everyone has their starting point, usually strongly associated with their cultural or familial identity. It takes a while for other info to filter through.

It very much cuts both ways.

We need far less nationalism in the world. It's never led to anything good.

Didn’t it lead to ending slavery tho?

This is a massive brainwashing that they've done. That's hard to reverse without directly pointing that out. Due to "political sensitivity" that won't be. (People are afraid of standing up to china)

A few things that are going on: (Check up on Serpentza+laowhy86 videos)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tsXtk7psUc

- The Confucius Institute is pushing propaganda campaigns in Unis and in public (Their adverts are spammed everywhere)

- In China, they do have people that are willing to turn you in for "violations" (non-government.. citizens)

-- See the video: they'll even try to interrupt talks in the US to "correct the record"

- Forums. Again SerpentZA has found that they are collecting together in Chinese only forums to doxx and harass. Death threats are common there.

>You'd think that even a casual search for a subject like Tiananmen Square would be a wake-up call.

That assumes they'd agree with the Tiananmen Square protests, which is quite a large assumption.

Some might disagree with any protest, like many of people in the US disagree with all kinds of protests (of left and right) -- e.g. because they're pro "law and order" and centrist --, and tons which disagree with protests of left XOR right.

Others might agree in principle, but still think China is better off without a regime change, which would be a huge unknown, and might even bring a huge 1.6 billion + country on the brink of chaos and civil war, with power struggles and what have you. Who said such a change is necessarily gonna be a peaceful transition? Officially or unofficially, they already have heard of stories of massive human toil in past power struggles (the "cultural revolution" for one), and might prefer stability and prosperity over democracy.

Or they could consider their situation just a-ok as it is, with its warts like many places have, but generally working well for the country (or for their personal interests).

Aside from propaganda, people also make their own minds, and what someone else, from another country believes they should be wanting, is not necessary what they do believe.

> Haven't these pro-Beijing students ever tried to access uncensored information online that was denied to them until they arrived in their host countries

Most (flat earthers/birthers/anti-vaxxers/people who believe all sorts of nonsense) have had access to uncensored information online for years.

They continue to believe the various crazy things that they believe.

Why do you think political opinions should be any different?

Shit, there's no shortage of people who, despite being willing to acquiesce to the factual truth of a statement, will actively choose to disregard it. They'll do it because the statement is incompatible with their political affiliation, because the statement was uttered by a foreigner who should be minding their own business, because the person who uttered it has the 'wrong' political affiliation or religion or class or skin color or background or profession.

This sort of tribalism is incredibly normal, and you don't need to travel abroad to find it.

I'm deeply concerned by the lack of introspection of anyone painting this as a problem unique to citizens of mainland China.

Quite on the contrary, Chinese students usually become way more nationalistic after being abroad and having seen for themselves that the western, developed, free and democratic countries aren't that much better after all.

Those who have never lived in the west can't draw comparisons from their own experience so they tend to be more skeptical of Chinese government and fantasize about the west.

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-Chinese-become-much-more-n...

Do you think Americans are going to hate their country after reading about MKUltra? How about solitary confinement? WMDs in Iraq?

> Do you think Americans are going to hate their country after reading about MKUltra?

One, we don’t censor that information.

Two, I’d expect most Americans to freely criticise those government actions, as well as the people and agencies responsible. The latter is prohibited in China.

>One, we don’t censor that information

You don't have to, when nobody really cares for it, and the system is such that nobody is gonna do anything about it (and the people who did those things get a slap on the wrist, if not a pat on the back).

It's regimes that lack this that censor information -- regimes that are worried that e.g. protests could result in bringing them down.

If you don't worry about that, you can let almost anything be said. Especially if you just let it be declassified/acknowledged decades after the fact, when even fewer will care.

The comment you are replying to is not making any judgment on the morality of the state, and is likely in agreement with you. It's just pointing out that the grandparent's rhetorical suggestion is undermined by an incorrect premise (that people don't know about US atrocities and their criticism and would be appalled to know them, where actually such information is easily available)

So what? I’m talking about why anybody would expect a Chinese student to change their attitude because of 6/4.

Your response and the others here have nothing to do with that.

> I’m talking about why anybody would expect a Chinese student to change their attitude because of 6/4

I wouldn’t, but that’s because of something deeper than anything we experience in America or Australia.

Consider pre-Snowden public opinions on mass surveillance. The public didn’t know and didn’t believe. Once the information came out, however, people believed. Some actions were taken, and on many fronts activism got aggressive. (A large minority accepted the new facts while deeming it acceptable. A smaller minority thinks the disclosures themselves were a conspiracy.)

It would be surprising if a majority of Chinese students, after learning about the massacre at Tiananmen Square [1], rejected it as a global propaganda campaign. Some will. More than in America, given the energy given to brainwashing by Beijing.

The difference will be in the number who believe it happened but defend it as having been necessary. Teaching the worth of democratic values is tough. The violence exhibited towards the Hong Kong protesters, and Beijing’s emissary’s support of it as patriotism, exemplifies that.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of...

> I wouldn’t, but that’s because of something deeper than anything we experience in America or Australia.

I'm sick of this holier than thou attitude that people have here. There's this patronizing attitude that if only the brain washed Chinese knew what was really happening they would rise up! Yet you know about the Nayirah testimony, MKUltra, Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, migrant camps... why aren't you out protesting, storming congress, why isn't Bush in prison, why isn't Trump impeached? It's not a "small minority"; it's the majority. Most Americans don't care enough to find out and if they did they wouldn't care enough to do anything.

I'd argue that the propaganda is much deeper and subtle in the West. The media is a oligarchy yet it's still "independent" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI You believe are the good guys despite history despite everything.

Trump isn't impeached simply because not enough representatives think that these are sufficiently severe atrocities to do so, and not enough people think that these are severe enough to undermine the state institutions.

You have legislators and media critical of the government wrt CA and migrant camps. That's why you don't see so much civil disobedience, because these concerns are visibly reflected in the government.

This doesn't mean I disagree with you that Chinese who know more about Tiananmen wouldn't "rise up", but against your argument that it is propaganda in the West that prevents people from civil disobedience.

I would agree that propaganda and soft power shape opinion and taboo in the West and US, but on the other hand, I don't think that this insidious and subtle propaganda is anywhere near as powerful as the total propaganda and coercion practiced by some other regimes.

>why isn't Bush in prison, why isn't Trump impeached? It's not a "small minority"; it's the majority

Because in America you can openly talk about those things on the press and the internet and comments, and thus let off steam...

Of course the end result is the same, as in China they keep happening!

Ultimately, what we have that China doesn't have is a system in place to address these concerns. Technology companies freely and openly made it more difficult for the NSA to spy. The prison system is on the minds of every politician and newspaper, and change is happening (slowly, sure). The Iraq war was debated to death.

Every country is going to have problems. It can never make decisions that satisfy everyone. What matters is the ability to talk about it, like what we're doing here. Politics is always going to be slow, though; that's the tradeoff versus having a dictator.

I can only speak for myself, my answer is no. I've read up on the numerous atrocities committed by the U.S. Government (highly recommend Wikileak Files: World according to U.S. Empire) I think citizens of every country shouldn't ignore their past, they should look directly towards it, grapple with the consequences, and critique it.

Americans didn’t have their government machine gun down peaceful protestors, then the medics and doctors who went to help them, and then run over the bodies with tanks until they were mush.

And if they had to learn about something that bad, they’d learn about it as soon as possible and the government would be powerless to cover it up.

> Do you think Americans are going to hate their country after reading about ...

Yes, this commonly occurs in fact. Americans trash their own country aggressively, routinely all over social media, for its flaws and past mistakes. See: Twitter, Reddit or Imgur comments every day of the week.

We pay sports athletes and celebrities tens of millions of dollars and they regularly trash the US for its flaws and past mistakes. They do so all over social media, routinely, and with few repercussions (essentially none from the government, and few from social blowback).

How many famous millionaire Hollywood celebrities would you like me to quote - eg from their tweets - saying they somehow hate the US or wish to leave?

A small minority of Americans do that and when talking about large populations, it goes without saying that we’re not talking about population distributions in an absolutist sense.

It isn't about how many people do that, it is about how many people can do that publicly without any repercussions towards them from the state. And I would say, in the US that proportion comes to around "pretty much all of them".

Actually that is not what this conversation is about.

No not a small minority.

No, but Americans do seem intent on labeling any modern day version of MKUltra to be a conspiracy theory only an idiot would believe. That might be worse than just censoring it.

It's cool, we already do.

Just because you have problems doesn't mean you can't point out that someone else does too, as long as you have acknowledged yours.

Reading about American atrocities doesn't make me hate my country, it makes me want my country to do better.

If you've unknowingly been fed propaganda your entire life, it's easy to dismiss the truth as propaganda from the "enemy".

William Shirer was an American living in Germany during Hitler's reign. Here's what he said about how successful propaganda can be:

"I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were."

[edit] The quote is from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, which is very good and a surprisingly easy read for how long it is.

Excellent quote, propaganda is used to manipulate people, especially those lack of calm mind and neutral view. Sadly though, today's media, especially those online ones, tend to feed you what audience interest with, not neutral on story, nor whole facts, e.g. the same event could be reported very differently on CNN and Fox. I wouldn't be surprised both sides of the arguments here read more news in their interest, or pro-their-views. Doesn't that put them in the situation German had, siloed in one side of the story, even for those educated and intelligent persons.

Perhaps a way to having a peaceful conversation is helping both sides to hear, read, understand others' points. It might not be easy though, the media are very much dominated by one language, that majority of one side in this argument doesn't speak, according to [1], 19.3% internet users contributes 1.7% content. In fact, it's VERY hard in this situation, to tell if we are the intelligent German in the story, or the William Shirer, regardless which side you are on.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet

Their government incentivizes this behavior. They will be willfully ignorant to those events so that they can maintain social standing back home.

I would like to know how much of this is state-organized thuggery, typical of all authoritarian regimes. As in, directly fund, indoctrinate and direct initimidation and violence against anything that is seen as threatening to the state.

That’s not how propaganda works, I assume the vast majority of these students haven’t left the country until close to adulthood. I completed elementary school in China and the teaching begins in grade 1 for students to believe in communism and patriotism. When you have been raised in that belief for your entire life, changing your belief system is not as simple as “look what other people with a different view say!”. Same goes for how people in other countries have a hard time understanding the need for civilians to hold guns, and yet no matter how many logical reasoning you throw, a large portion of Americans still believe in guns.

Edit: my comment was downvoted, unsure if it’s because the comparison for gun law in the states provoked someone, but if that was the case it just goes to show how difficult it’d be for someone to change the belief system they’ve been raised with

This is one reason I decided to go back to America once we had a kid. I’m not a big fan of nationalism.

Unfortunately, I’m a bit worried about American schools, many now require daily pledge of allegiance here in Washington state, which was definitely not true when I was a kid. It just feels like something China would do but the USA shouldn’t.

> many now require daily pledge of allegiance here in Washington state

Haven’t court decisions rendered pupils’ participation in the pledge of allegiance optional in all 50 states?

Yes. But that doesn’t mean they still can’t require time be set aside for it and for it to be socially awkward to opt out.

> socially awkward to opt out

random aside, there was a kid in my Texas high-school who stopped saying the pledge around the time of the 2003 Iraq war. While I didn't necessarily agree with the method, a few of us did appreciate the fact that he did that; it showed that sometimes the most patriotic thing you can do is not blindly support your government.

Texas even requires parental consent on opt out, so the kid had to have a good support network.

Random q: where were you based in China?

Beijing. I was working for MS China.

Interesting, I was curious. Personally, I feel like the nationalism has gotten a lot worse / uncomfortable in Guangdong in recent years. I don't feel like it used to be this way in anything-goes Southern China.

I don’t think it was that bad in 1999, 2002 or 2008. Indoctrination was still a thing, but most Chinese kids didn’t take it seriously. It took some populism combined with nationalism from Xi to really turn things around.

My time in China doesn't go back that far, but it certainly feels different from when I first went there. Guangdong used to feel pretty chill about that stuff, probably a combination of HK-Proximity and the Emperor-is-Far/Mountains-are-high attitude. Nowadays, you can't drive anywhere without seeing Xi's 12 fucking thoughts plastered everywhere. Even Hua Qiang Bei has speakers blasting out propaganda.

That they're technically optional doesn't prevent peers for bullying over it.

Source: I was an Australian citizen while in US schools from 2nd through 12th grade. It can be highly uncomfortable to stand silently (and politely) during the Pledge.

When I was in school, almost no one actually said the pledge. By the time I was in high school almost every just sat and continued doing what they were doing. This was in a conservative suburban school in the south.

It's not surprising to me that it's variable. The school administration, culture, and individual teachers matter a lot.

For example, a Colorado teacher physically assaulted a student for not saying it: https://kdvr.com/2018/08/31/teacher-accused-of-assaulting-st...

Another teacher just tried the guilt trip approach: https://fox2now.com/2018/11/16/teacher-banned-after-students...

Students saying the pledge is pointless and inane, but I'm pretty sure most just say the words without really thinking about them.

I also live in WA state and I feel like the daily pledge of allegiance here is pretty trivial.

It's just something the kids say, the school isn't building it up or making it a huge deal or forcing them to believe in it like it's the only thing that matters.

Comparing this to China's brainwashing is a huge slippery slope IMO.

I think in terms of US school problems, this one is pretty low on the list. I would be far more worried about general quality of the schools, curriculum, "active shooter drills" and other insane safety measures, and increasing lack of funding for basics like acceptable landscaping and art/music classes.

My point was that I moved from China back to here to avoid stuff like that for my kid, and am disappointed that things have changed for the worse since I was a kid growing up in the same area.

It is a “small thing” of course compared to comprehensive political education, but it is a thing and signals the start of a trend that could turn out to be dangerous (doubly so in this age of Trump-style ultra nationalism).

> it is a thing and signals the start of a trend

Saying the pledge of allegiance in school has been around since I was a kid in the 80s though, and I'm fairly certain it's been this way since basically forever. So IMO it doesn't seem like it's the "start" of anything.

There was no pledge said at my schools in the 90s.

>a large portion of Americans still believe in guns.

It would be the exact same situation if American students in Australia or England were trying to shut down a rally against gun ownership.

I personally believe in the right to own a gun in written into the constitution of the united states...as is the right to burn a flag..I don't own a gun and would not burn a flag...and if I was in Australia, I would definitely not try to stop people from burning an American flag..

The point I’m trying to get across and explain here is that there are ideas that seem obvious to one set of people, can be incredibly difficult to get across to another set of people due to what they have believed in since childhood. And the fact that I’m getting so many downvoted and people trying to debate and disapprove of my gun law comparison proves that exact point.

Probably the guns.

Americans are going to look at the broader issue here and think "Last time this happened for us we just shot at them until they left" and disregarding the practicality of such notions, it's nevertheless baked into the collective consciousness and constitution.

Tl;dr this is the one major situation where guns, as they exist in the US constitution, can be justified unequivocally.

The Hong Kong residents hasn’t really done themselves any favours and won the hearts and minds of the mainlanders. They’ve always been viewed as snobbish and generally hold mainlanders in low regard. It doesn’t help that Hong Kong media makes a big fuss about how uneducated mainlanders are whenever some mother lets her child urinate or defecate on public transport.

Most mainlanders still insist that Taiwan is a part of China and Hong Kong’s protests is just some political unrest stirred up by Western countries to cause trouble.

Coupled with a lifetime of brainwashing and propaganda (their primary school textbooks have dedicated sections where the students recite their love for their country and the communist party), I am not surprised at this at all.

Most still justify Tiananmen Square as something that had to be done to preserve the stability of the country. Secondly, they see any Western criticism as third parties commenting on an internal China political issue, of which they have no right to.

That’s just western propaganda /s

The civilians are not supporting the China Communist Party- they are supporting the unification of China, by whatever mean possible.

Call it the Chinese Manifesto, if you will. South China Sea expansion, Taiwan, HK, Belt and Road Initiatives. Chinese believes that all these are from their ancestors, and one day China will reclaim all the territories that were stolen from China by foreign powers.

I know this sounds racist but it's true. Just go on Youtube and watch all those Simplified Chinese-only propaganda videos.