Chinese
July 12th, 2025
In political news, it's quite often the case that an undercurrent of propaganda swims underneath headlines. On CNN the headlines state "The deadly drug that's complicating US-China trade" and "Justice Department says 2 Chinese nationals charged with spying inside the US for Beijing". The words chosen are "barbed with hemlock" and accusatory towards Chinese. Repeated exposure to aggressively biased headlines cause readers to subconsciously associate China as an enemy due to word choice association.
The reverse is true, viewing pro-Chinese videos on YouTube, such as "Honest view on China after 11 years (American's POV)". Saying it's an "honest view" and "China" in the same sentence causes the reader to associate the two positively.
Each sentence we read updates the meaning of the words within the very sentence. In this particular example, we update our mental image of "China" when we read news about China, as it's meta-baked and meta-embedded in the language we're updating.
Because of this, I want to learn Mandarin Chinese to gain exposure to different perspectives and viewpoints. In the West, we're slowly becoming more and more intolerant of new, fresh counter-culture ideas as wokeism takes firm root. Sam Altman writes in his blog post E Pur Si Muove:
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home.
American society has become more priggish. You can easily be met with accusations of non-PC behaviour, and there's much effort put in to moral grandstand. It's hard to challenge pre-existing beliefs if, well, challenges aren't morally acceptable or allowed.
China does enforce censorship of information and crackdown on the spread of certain information. But they enforce a different approach and mode of thinking overall, one that could broaden understanding of the world away from a euro-centric point-of-view. Understanding why censorship from a top-down level occurs in an empathetic take could broaden understanding of the human condition.
On a side-note, we may be at a point in western society that the majority lacks critical thinking to take accountability for their own values and beliefs. Woke culture encourages minorities (and non-minorities) to take a stance of simultaneous victimization and moral-superiority, and forces other groups to behave deferentially without questioning. It prioritizes feeling good and increasing the sensitivity to its loss, which in turn encourages participating in outrage. From outrage, victimization and increased sensitivity, and the cycle repeats itself in a manner where nobody takes responsibility. We've become a citizenry of Pavlov's dogs, in chains of learned helplessness, and permanently victimizing the human condition without granting the dignity and self-respect deserved to a life on planet earth.