I often thought that the best way to find out how people feel is to ask them, but in China that doesn’t work very well. With censors looking over your shoulder all the time, it seems like an oppressive culture to live in. Imagine not being able to say what you want about your government. That would drive people in the United States to unruliness. Only now, China is becoming even more restrictive.
Imagine that you are a school teacher and the local Democratic Party leader says those comments you made to your students the other day are unpatriotic. You need more education and we are going to help you out. They remove you from school and put you in a detention center run by the Party, not by the local police. There you are “corrected” until you realize that even things you say to children get back to the state. What can you do? Don’t say those things again and do what the Party tells you. That is exactly what will happen under new rules in China today.
Tell me that is a better system than almost anywhere else on earth. A man who defected from a repressive regime when he was 14, told me he could tell the difference between a man who was free and one who wasn’t. “They act free”, he said.
I saw a BBC reporter trying to interview people coming out of the conference in Beijing and some of them literally ran from her, rather than be questioned about what they thought about the conference. The Chinese do not act free, probably because they are not. More restrictions eventually lead to conformance. The only alternative is revolution.
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