They are smart people who like living in the US a whole hell of a lot more than China, and realize it's really easy to get their visa pulled.
I think it's more a case of the fact that most people just don't take much effort to go beyond what they were taught. For an American example of this, let's leave aside the whole debate over whether the Civil War was over states rights or slavery, and go for something less controversial. I bet if you go to the Southern US and ask high school educated whites, you would find a substantial portion of folks who think that blacks were generally well treated as slaves and liked the institution, until the north forced the end of slavery at the end of the civil war (and they will also tell you that war was all about states rights, not slavery, of course). This, in a country where there are no government controls or restrictions on the freedom of information (indeed, we're possibly the most free country in the world in that regard, or at least close to the top), and with a fairly good public educational system that at least in theory tries to teach objective fact. Now compare China, where information is tightly controlled by the government, education is poor outside of the rich areas of the cities, and outside of the hard sciences is always explicitly designed to indoctrinate, and where the media is tightly restricted and controlled as well. I'm not saying that nobody in China knows about Tienanmen or the Great Firewall, or that it's impossible to find out about, but I think that most people probably either think of them as necessary (because that's what they've been taught), or just don't know much about them other than vague rumors, and probably feel about them the same way that most Americans feel about the various conspiracy theories that Obama is a Muslim or not a natural born US citizen (i.e. that they're weird fringe theories that have some vague validity in fact, but aren't really worth serious consideration).
Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.
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Threadjack Alert
Fri Dec 19, 2008 at 04:10:46 PM EST
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I bet if you go to the Southern US and ask high school educated whites, you would find a substantial portion of folks who think that blacks were generally well treated as slaves and liked the institution
Overgeneralize much?
Jesus it's been a while since I've heard that little piece of outside-the-south "common knowledge". 50 years ago at the dawn of the civil rights era that may - may, mind you - have been a true statement in some small pockets of the south. But I can tell you from loads of personal experience with several different flavors of redneck that even the most racist crackers among them don't believe that bullshit today
The whole "the darkies are happy" myth was largely promulgated by wealthy, educated, slave-owning southerners and their descendants to salve their own guilty consciences. Poor whites, many of whom came out of the sharecropping system themselves, had no such illusions.
{Insert amusing quotation here}
