Reddit Has Become a Battleground of Alleged Chinese Trolls

If you ever meet someone from mainland China, such as university students, they take criticism of China very seriously. For example, mentioning Taiwan as an independent country is an offence and will shock most Chinese mainlanders. But this is similar to foreigners criticizing the 2nd amendment or similar parts of American culture. It will create the same passionate response in most Americans.

The more Chinese students learn about websites such as reddit, the more you will find these responses. You can't just expect them to just sit idle. The fact that English is not their native language will however make others qualify them as trolls/bots

I work with a lot of people from mainland China and I have not once gotten the impression of any generic sensitivity to criticism of China.

mainland china is pretty big. you two should be a little more specific.

> I work with a lot of people from mainland China and I have not once gotten the impression of any generic sensitivity to criticism of China.

Those kind of reactions often, but not always, get muted the longer the person is exposed to more diverse perspectives outside of the mainland.

There's also a cultural trait in China where you strongly defend your in-group against criticisms from an out-group, even if those criticisms are valid. I have a Chinese friend who considers his mom to be kind of lazy (and tells her so), but if someone from outside the family made the same criticism, he'd strongly defend her as a hard worker. The same thing is true of criticisms made by non-Chinese of China.

Just wanted to share this of article because I think it applies to both sides: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Just as there are ideas you can’t discuss without being called a communist/socialist/authoritarian/nazi/racist etc in American discourse, so too are there touchy topics in Chinese discourse. They’re just different so we can clearly see them.

I've met foreign exchange students from China that believed the control of free information online was a good thing.

Chinese people can have different opinions from each other.

There are staunch defenders of CCP and China in general, there are people with more nuanced views, there are ones who are super critical of CCP, and there many who are apolitical.

That being said, even as someone with mixed opinions of CCP, I definitely am careful at sharing pro-China ideas in non-Chinese spaces, due to the likelihood of causing arguments or inviting personal attacks; but I feel much safer expressing criticisms of China.