Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

I said a similar thing yesterday but I think it has become clear that importing from China was mostly fine for our country, debatable on the lost jobs and environmental part sure, but exporting to China was a poison pill that we never should have swallowed.

China has become less liberal, in the meaningful ways, since Nixon "opened up" China in the 20th century. And the flip side is that when we began exporting to them we installed pathways for China to control and de-liberalize the US.

The more economically important China becomes to the US the more it will control our companies and public political sphere.

Hey, I wonder where did you get the less liberal part? From my experience China has become greatly more liberal during the last 30-50 years. When Nixon "opened up" China it was during the culture revolution and those were really tragic years for Chinese people. Since then average Chinese has become less poor and more liberal steadily each year.

The issue is that the more you import from China, the more USD they accumulate, and the more attractive an export market they become. Trade is a two-way street, you can't keep up a permanent stream of imports forever without giving something in return. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

That's a totally fair point, I think maybe since 1980's might be more accurate?

In my experience, and this is mostly for Chinese who fled to either Hong Kong or the US at some point in their lives, if they are >40 years old they dislike China and view it as an oppressive regime. That makes sense since they ran away.

If they are <40 years old they're pretty blasé about China and don't really care about the regime or view it as particularly oppressive. In university is where most of these people I met came from.

Does that not gel with your experience?

I agree with you that >40 years old dislike China more as they never benefitted from the China's economic take-off that happened after 1990.

But I think for regular Chinese, the younger they are, the more liberal their world views are. This is because the education they received are more westernized each year (You might be surprised). Younger Chinese are generally more proficient in English. And to learn English people have to expose themselves to original English materials. I still remember when I was learning English I got access to things like TED, Open courseware such as Harvard's Justice, shows like the Newsroom, movies like the 12 Angry Men. China's human right records today is not good, but it was much much worse 30 years ago. Back then rural Chinese would kill new born female babies, have no issue buying and selling women (here's a movie about the topic[1]) and toddlers. People from different provinces fought and discriminated each other. And those are not government sponsored, just people being poor and illiterate. Now average Chinese are more literate and many more attended higher education (there's no higher education during the culture revolution)[2]. To this end I need to thank Nixon and people doing business with China. The average Chinese has a better life and can think more rationally thanks to economic and educational improvements.

On the other hand, internet censorship has become more strict after 2010. People do find ways to access VPN, it's just they don't discuss sensitive topics on Chinese internet.

1. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blind_mountain_2007

2. http://uis.unesco.org/en/country/cn (notice the Tertiary education section)