The belief that the Chinese government can be trusted to benefit its people or decide what information they should or should not have access to. (The primary reason this gets on the list is the sheer size of China. There are other governments which are much, much worse and have similar delusions by the people. But the damage level done is frequently much smaller.)
I’m a bit surprised at that one—the current Chinese government seems pretty rational and efficient to me, and I’d be hard-pressed to say what I would do differently in it’s place or rather—there are things I would do differently, but I’m not sure I’d get better results).
Control of information by the government should be seen mostly as a way of preserving it’s own power. So I’m not really sure of how to interpret “The belief that the Chinese government can be trusted to [...] decide what information they should or should not have access to.”—could you rephrase that belief so that it’s irrationality becomes more apparent, maybe tabooing “can be trusted to” ? If you mean “Chinese people wrongly believe that the government is restricting information access for their own good”, then I’m not sure that a lot of people actually believe that, and for those that do, that believing it does any harm.
If you mean “Chinese people wrongly believe that the government is restricting information access for their own good”, then I’m not sure that a lot of people actually believe that, and for those that do, that believing it does any harm.
Ok. My impression is that that is a common belief in China and is connected to the belief that the government doesn’t actively lie. I don’t have a very good citation for this other than general impressions so I’m going to point to a relevant blog entry by a friend who spent a few years in China where she discusses this with examples. There are of course even limits to how far that will go. This is also complicated by the fact that many of the really serious harm in China (detainment of citizens for questioning policies, beatings and torture, ignoring of basic environmental and safety issues) stem from the local governments rather than the central government, and the relationship between Beijing and the local governments is very complicated. See also my remarks above to wedrifid which touch on these issues also. So yeah, it may make sense to take this off the list given the lack of harm directly coming from this issue.
Lists like that are good !
I’m a bit surprised at that one—the current Chinese government seems pretty rational and efficient to me, and I’d be hard-pressed to say what I would do differently in it’s place or rather—there are things I would do differently, but I’m not sure I’d get better results).
Control of information by the government should be seen mostly as a way of preserving it’s own power. So I’m not really sure of how to interpret “The belief that the Chinese government can be trusted to [...] decide what information they should or should not have access to.”—could you rephrase that belief so that it’s irrationality becomes more apparent, maybe tabooing “can be trusted to” ? If you mean “Chinese people wrongly believe that the government is restricting information access for their own good”, then I’m not sure that a lot of people actually believe that, and for those that do, that believing it does any harm.
Ok. My impression is that that is a common belief in China and is connected to the belief that the government doesn’t actively lie. I don’t have a very good citation for this other than general impressions so I’m going to point to a relevant blog entry by a friend who spent a few years in China where she discusses this with examples. There are of course even limits to how far that will go. This is also complicated by the fact that many of the really serious harm in China (detainment of citizens for questioning policies, beatings and torture, ignoring of basic environmental and safety issues) stem from the local governments rather than the central government, and the relationship between Beijing and the local governments is very complicated. See also my remarks above to wedrifid which touch on these issues also. So yeah, it may make sense to take this off the list given the lack of harm directly coming from this issue.
I don’t interpret the story in that blog post that way at all. People repeating nationalist lies doesn’t mean they’ve been fooled.
I highly recommend these posts about the psychology of mass lies. I don’t recommend the third part.