Hacker News Reader

Comment by bostonsre | Hacker News Reader

I personally haven't met anyone from China who has liked their government. I would assume there is some selection bias there and those that love their country are more likely to stay home, but would be really interested to talk to a true believer. I wouldn't be surprised if pressure was applied to those individuals to harass the one that spoke out against the party. The regime is brutal and most will toe the line when their family is threatened back home.

View on HN

Have you met them at a $30k+/yr university? I think that's an important piece of context here. The current Chinese system affords these students the ability to go to prestigious universities abroad. Things are going good for these students, so why wouldn't they like the government that grants them such privilege?

Folks who've immigrated for other reasons might have a different experience...

Does Chinese government pay the tuition for these students? That sounds like too good to be true.

For some of them, yes [0], but even beside that, if you're well off enough, in country that treats dissenters so poorly, to send your child abroad to study at an expensive university, you're likely in favor of the status quo.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Scholarship_Council

Total number of Chinese students about 370k https://fortune.com/2021/08/16/us-universities-international...

Your link shows: The CSC funds approximately 65,000 Chinese students studying abroad in a given year, and the same number of international students in China.[1]

The vast majority of students from China in western countries pay out of their own pockets, i.e. their parents saved up or their family are wealthy.

Don't get confused with the CSC who mainly give scholarships (tuition, accommodation, stipend) to non Chinese nationals to study in China.

I don't think I met any in college who spoke about their thoughts about the CCP. But yea, it definitely seems plausible and very likely that there are a proportion that are grateful to the CCP for the opportunities they are given. I would be extremely curious about the ratio that is thankful to the party versus thankful that they've escaped.

> I would be extremely curious about the ratio that is thankful to the party versus thankful that they've escaped.

Escaped? Lolololol.

If China is as bad as the western mainstream media or some of those anti-China YouTube channels make it out to be, then all of those Chinese students (middle class or above) that studied in western countries would do whatever they could to stay but the majority go back to China to live and work.

Of all the Chinese friends I made in China, some are not satisfied with the CCP, mainly to do with the issue of free speech/censorship and that you cannot criticise the CCP openly. I would say the majority love their country, including the ones that studied in western countries.

If you want to talk to a true believer, go to reddit, on /r/sino. /r/china has the people critical to China, /r/sino has the pro-CCP crowd. As for similar subs I'd expect the threshold for getting banned to be fairly low, though.

I'd be pretty curious to know if there are many people working for the CCP in propaganda in the /r/china forum. The possibility of astroturfing makes it kind of impossible to know the truth. But, I will definitely give it a read.

/r/china is very critical of the CCP, so I doubt there are many there - even relatively innocuous-looking stuff positive on China tends to get piled on there. /r/sino is opposite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com