Westerners crying that China helped subsidized their shitty liberal democracies since the 2000s and subsequently probably saved them from an even worse crisis than they are facing now. From Pew Research Center.
Quoted from South China Morning Post (paywalled):
Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, said populations in Singapore and Malaysia were more “primed towards pliancy to authority” and tended to place more emphasis on economic performance.
I really do hate this rhetoric that somehow Malaysia/Singapore values authoritarianism (whatever that means). Liberal politics will never understand how even if the 2 countries are functionally 1 party states and may not be the most socially liberal places in the world, the parties carried and boosted economic performance, making both nations the top 3 in GDP per capita in southeast asia.
Personally, they would never get how economic performance has allowed my family to literally escape from poverty and peasant level subsistance farming to clean, modern houses and high-school/university education. Of course they wouldn’t understand. Muh liberal values and hooman rights.
The West would rather see us fighting for scraps and being unstable and war torn like the Middle East. Fuck them.
The number of participants is quite small, too. Excluding Amerika, not even 21 thousand people participated in all of these countries combined (an average of 1164 people per country). I’d hope that most people (outside of the vocal online anticommunists) realize that they’re uninformed and have no particular opinion on China, but maybe I’m being too optimistic
For germany i can tell you that its actually pretty accurate. The things they teach you about china in school, and the things they say in the news are all to uphold the picture of a tryannical china. Most people think uyghurs are getting killed off, theres no democracy or personal freedom, all the usual stuff. Im being looked at like a crazy person for trying to explain wtf is actually going on (even by so called “socialists” friends).
a little related story: I had to do a little booklet about china in 8th grade (around 2014), i found it recently after forgetting about it and damn was it sad to see that it was actual indoctrination that was going on. If I find it again, and its as bad as I remember, I could make a post about it.
edit: I found it, if i find the fitting community for it im gonna make a post about how propaganda works in germany. I can actually remember some of the lessons now, and while its not complete demonization, it imo most defintiely is attempted (and successful) propaganda.
I was thinking that less young people watch mainstream “news”, but that might not be true because of social media. You’re right about the indoctrination in school – children need to be taught to critically analyze information (not just lip service), but that would be inconvenient for the bourgeois government
It only seems to be 19 countries within or close to the imperial core, too.
I doubt the investigators would get the same results if they included the rest of the world.
But that would skew the 19-country median, so even if they conducted that research they might find a way not to publish it. E.g. by saying that the results from, say, Angola (random example) are too few to be statistically relevant. Or they would group all the African countries so they only count as one vs all the individual European countries.