I ask because on basically every post of a video where no Chinese person is doing something bad, people immediately rush to calling it staged; Chinese person provides a needy person a meal? Staged. Chinese person offers meals for free to earthquake rescue workers? Staged. Chinese person helps someone across a road? Staged. Uyghur just operating a stand being asked by an American tourist if they’re living peacefully (to which they laugh and say yes)? Staged, or even saying yes because their lives depend on it.
Chinese person being racist however? Real. Chinese person yelling at someone and being rude? Real.
You know that racist trope people have of folks in Africa all believing in different superstitions or something? That’s the average American; the bizarre folklore we’ve created of people around the world would make Tolkien’s work seem like low fantasy.
Is it perhaps that white savior movies have rotted people’s brains, and they’re all imagining their normalcy would make them superior beings in foreign countries?
You joke but I know a lib who claims to not be as gullible as the average lib who was genuinely shocked when I told him there’s a Disneyland in China that has people dressed as Winnie the Pooh and that they sell Winnie the Pooh merch there; his instinctive reaction was to ask ‘It’s not banned?!’
One of the biggest things that gave me a suspicion that it wasn’t as bad as the propaganda was knowing a lot of people who moved from China growing up, and none that I knew ever complained about anything in China, if it was so dystopian you would think they would say something about that? I guess people rationalize it by saying it’s just so instilled in them not to question authority.
The ‘letters being banned’ thing is also based on a widely reported story about the letter N being blocked on weibo during a leadup to the Two Sessions that credulous westerners ate right up
it was reasonable precautionary measure that only lasted as long as Nick Mullen’s tourist visa
Lmaooooo