Charlie, as a real Chinese that came from China and lives in Canada now, I'd like to give my opinions about what you brought out today, that is: How to understand China and more.
First of all, The biggest mistake that all Westerners made and have been making when dealing with China and Chinese people is that they assume that China is just another NORMAL country on the other side of the Earth and thus Chinese people are nice like us while totally neglecting the cultural differences, especially the conflicting parts, and ideological incompatibilities.
For example, China is a country that has thousands of years of feudal social and political systems that had basically not been interrupted and thus changed by the West cultures and ideologies. Therefore, Chinese people in general are very much the inheritors of these obsolete and even fatuous cultures and ideologies even if now days Chinese like to eat some Western food like hamburgers in McDonald's and wear suits on the street.
But if you look at a typical Chinese family's life, especially how their family members treat each other, you will understand the true Chinese stuff: Say between the parents and children, there is always a built-in ownership framework, that is: the parents are the owners of their kids and children are just their assets, and so the parents naturally have the authorities and rights to control their children's life on almost every aspect from the childhood to even adulthood. In Chinese cultures, we call this as Confucianism which contributes a lot to typical Chinese characteristics such as the blind obedience to authorities and power, lack of independently thinking abilities, etc, and these flawed personalities result in lots of bad social and political behaviors and weaknesses like extreme nationalism and patriotism, easily being brain-washed, to name a few.
So if the Westerners didn't understand these fundamentals in the Chinese cultures, or choose to ignore them, and also use the same way to deal with Chinese and China, then they will create their own Chinese problems as time goes by. And this is the exact the mistake the Western elites made in the last decades from bringing China into the WTO by lowering the basic entry thresholds -- things like human rights, political systems, etc -- to let China take over and corrupt all international organizations like WHO, UN etc.
If US and Western authorities had just treated China the same way as they did with other socialist countries like North Korea, Cuba in terms of all international rules and regulations, China wouldn't have had a chance to go so far in their economical , scientific and technological developments.
Now the West and China are intertwined so much in the economical fields, it will be a painful and lengthy process to getting rid of China. Fortunately, the Western political and social systems have not been corrupted by the inside Leftists to a point with no return and also not been infiltrated so badly by China and its politically affiliated Western elites like Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates and many more, there is still a hope that the West will win against China in the next number of years, say 5-10 years for China is now on the brink of total collapses on almost every aspect in its society!
God bless America!
