Hello my fellow ABCml! I agree with your points about material conditions changing people’s perception of reality. A visit to China when I was younger was what really kicked off my disillusionment with liberalism and got me questioning my old anti-China views haha. There are very few instances of my worldview being so completely shattered by a simple visit, and China wasn’t even that developed back then. Goes to show you how strong the western media brainwashing is and how the manufacturing consent machine can ironically make Westerners much more ignorant of the world, unlike what the typical liberal view of there being “free and independent media” in the West. Curious if you also had a similar deprogramming moment or if you have always been an ML?

The other big part of whether one enjoys their visit to China is if they speak the language. By virtue of having a Chinese face, people are going to default to speaking in Chinese. I’ve met a few ABCs who don’t speak Chinese, so when they visited China, they felt very uncomfortable. I am definitely still working on my Chinese and wouldn’t consider myself fluent, but I can definitely say that as my Chinese has gotten better, my experience in China has improved too.

If there is one thing that I find weird, it’s that some people visit China and still leave convinced that the West and liberalism is superior to socialism. They have repeatedly visited, so it’s not like they can’t see the massive improvements in society, chalking it up to China adopting capitalism. Of course, these same people will blame anything they don’t like about China to communism, but I guess cognitive dissonance is the norm for liberals lol

One final big benefit of being a pro-China ML is watching China’s rise in recent years and actually feeling excited about it. Even though implementation may not have been perfect, broadly speaking Socialism with Chinese Characteristics has vindicated Deng Xiaoping’s claim on how socialism in the final analysis develops the productive forces more rapidly than capitalism. While there are obviously a lot of negative things going on in the world, China’s rise has not been one of them. It’s both hilarious and sad to see liberals be in full blown panic as capitalism runs into crisis and socialism has shown itself to be a superior mode of production. Chinese libs who spent a lot of energy sucking up to the West and trying to immigrate here for the “freedom” and who have spent a lot of time looking down on their fellow Chinese who are more supportive of the government are now realizing that the illusion of freedom in the West is just that, an illusion. At least some of them are slowly changing their minds, so that’s good I guess.

Overall, I’m optimistic for China’s future and the future of Chinese people all over the world. 中华人民共和国万岁！