‘Wake-up call’: China threatens Australia’s iron exports after COVID-19 inquiry

How can you know this? I'm serious, legitimate question.

Because I can speak Chinese and I can talk to Chinese people face to face when I visit China so my interactions with Chinese people are not subject to internet censorship.

Sure I haven't talked to all 1.4 billion Chinese, no one has. So I don't know what every single Chinese person thinks. But I've talked to enough that there is a general pattern. What I see is that older people generally have more positive views of western countries, and younger people who have traveled more often have less positive views.

My view is that most people hold a world view that is shaped by what the world was like in their formative years. Older Chinese who were in their teens when China first opened up were far more enamored of Western countries because back then everything in the West was better than what was available in China. So even if they had not traveled abroad themselves, the word from people who had went abroad was unanimously positive about the outside world. So this became a part of their world view. This generation continue to encourage their kids to go abroad or study abroad.

The younger generation of people who reached their teens post 2010 are far more nationalist. They grew up hearing how great Western countries are from their parents and then when they travel abroad the contrast between expectation and reality is really jarring. The general experience among those who have lived abroad in Western countries is that Western countries are a lot less impressive up close and their parents have overly romanticized Western countries.

Obviously these are just generalization, there are people who think differently from their peers.

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - news.com.au