Now to everyone else, because it sounds like you will find this very hard to listen to right now, I think a good antidote to the fake narrative that "the Chinese government does not represent the Chinese people" is history. China in 20C had the bloodiest most awfully brutal civil war for the last 400 years. It was a popular revolution overthrowing a corrupt, lazy, anachronistic, incompetent dynasty (and then republic) and basically stretched from 1911 to the end of the cultural revolution. Then, the governing system they created out of this, has gone about in the last 70 years lifting more people out of poverty than anywhere else, and building something truly amazing. I hope you'll, you know, give the Chinese and their system some credit. Anyway...my point is, that if the Chinese people are not happy with their government, there's no other place on earth where the government would be more afraid of their people's wrath than China. Just look at the history. Look at the hunger they have for creating a better life. Look at how the government is forced to deliver. And look at the complacent stagnation and lazy woolly propagandist rest-on-yer-laurels thinking that has metastasized in most of the Western world.

So, contrary to the popular, but incorrect anti-China notion that you can't trust the Chinese government, I think you can trust them more than any other place on Earth right now to deliver as they say, and to deliver results for their citizens. Simple as that, really. And I think most Chinese are proud and happy to have such a system.

This shrieking Western hysteria smacks (to me, anyway) of bitter nostalgia for imperial glory-days where we could pull off stunts like "the treaty of Nanking" and "the Opium War", the "United East India Company" and wiping out native populations of N and S American, and Australian aborigines.

I'm not anti-West. I'm just balanced between both places. And speaking up against the river of fake and negative opinion, which, in my view, only serves to hasten the West's demise by blinding them to what they could learn, and giving them the fake pay off of feeling good by (doing that old colonial thing) of putting other people down and pretending they're better.

But to bring it back to you finally... if you want to make it about identity, then sure, I'm just more cosmopolitan than you are. In your future jaunts, I hope you're able to see beyond the veil and check those implanted biases with other stuff you don't need. So you can finally see clearly. Best of luck! :P ;) xx