The Chinese Perception

Guest: Haifeng Huang, PhD, Assistant Political Science Professor at the University of California, Merced  Authoritarian governments, like China’s, go to great lengths to control the information coming into their countries as a way of keeping their citizens content. The idea is people won’t want to organize or rise up in protest if they don’t know what they’re missing. If they don’t know how the rest of the world lives.  Here’s the problem: controlling the message too much, can backfire in a fascinating way. Many Chinese romanticize how great they think we have things, and that makes them less content with their own lives. Exactly the opposite of what the Chinese government is going for with its censorship program.