“Critical discussions” tend to go something like this. The class member with the best Party ties spouts the complete nonsense that is the official line, and then every other student will nod, smile and say he or she agrees when called on.

The hive mind rules in the Chinese classroom.

If you are truly, truly fortunate, you make have a student who will come talk to you about it one-on-one, days later and away from the prying eyes and ears of their classmates. Such students are one in sixty.

Unfortunately, there are people in the US paid to ignore evidence and facts as well…

Not even slightly. See public intellectuals such as Sima Nan, that fella that punched the old guy or Xenophobic Yang Rui. There are people who are paid to express a countervailing opinion despite evidence and fact being against them.

And I’d like to add my voice to the “trouble loading this site” crowd: it’s becoming a real nuisance.

Doesn’t this last paragraph somewhat dilute Murong’s point? If there is such a dichotomy of opinion, then someone somewhere must be doing some heavy duty critical thinking. This would be ironic since he also said….

“Most people in China suffer from an inability-to-accept-facts syndrome. They only believe what they want to believe and can’t see facts that are painful or contradict their own views.”

Over and over again, I’m reminded that what we see as ‘Modern Chinese Culture’ is really just ‘the only freakin’ solution we could come up with to ______ 1.5 billion people’ Look at the school system, the rote learning, look at the notion of 忍, look at the traffic, at the pollution, look at Chinese cuisine (every kind of root, weed; intenstines, dogmeat, etc). Being nice to each other is a luxury that China just cannot afford at the moment.

I come from a rich, very small country, that has no clue what it would do if it had anything close to China’s population.China is very much a developing country, maybe in 50 years we can get around to this issue.

The poor sods who were killed or injured during the Tuskegee Experiments were the victims of government, but finally they or their families were compensated and I won’t get arrested for writing about them. That’s a big difference.

China wants to bury these facts forever, and then continue to make awful decisions, and then bury those facts too. Some day, that’s got to end.

Many of the dead were literally eaten, often by surviving family members.

Yep. And if I remember my Frank Dikötter correctly, folks tended to die in drips and drabs—not in the huge genocide-sized numbers that would have necessitated mass graves.

Many of the dead were literally eaten, often by surviving family members.

“Most people in China suffer from an inability-to-accept-facts syndrome.”

This past semester, one of my Marxism graduate students literally claimed to the rest of the class that present-day China was a “classless society.”

No one dared to openly contradict her.