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No. You admit being Canadian, perhaps of Chinese ethnicity. Maybe a Taiwanese or a Hong Konger at that, given how you specify not getting into fights with «Mainland» Chinese here. And I do not know when you've last been to Mainland China and how long you've lived in Canada, but you write like an Indian, with the over-the-top emotive rhetorical flourish and confident pride in your eloquence that I have never seen a Mainland-educated person display in English (then again I could be accused of much the same). You might even believe this alone makes you better than them, you assimilated so well after all, and the Chinese are known for strong internal racism. However, I'll allow that you're probably a first-generation immigrant, seeing as how you attack fellow immigrants and give them this boomerish no-nonsense advice on fitting in. You are also not particularly informed about the conditions of either American or Chinese economy, given that we've seen a spectacular refutation of your June thesis («The American economy is not dependent on imports from China») here with the October MOFCOM Surprise that forced the US into a humiliating climbdown. I'd say >5 years since last stay in China. Right? The idea I'm seeing among people routinely doing business with China, the knowledge of Chinese way of life is completely obsolete within about 5 years.
More generally, I put extremely little faith in «I'm from X and here's the ugly truth» type takes, ironic as that is, given that I'm sometimes providing such opinions on Russia. Many people are dissatisfied in the condition of their nation; those are the Russians saying they're inept orcs and the frontline will crumble in two weeks, the Americans complaining of their intolerable wage slavery to the middle-class Shanghainese on Rednote, and of course the Chinese who've internalized the more charismatic white narrative about their inferiority, or just grew dismayed of the grift and striverism. But many Chinese including my friends in various walks of life and in different countries hold views opposite to yours; and many Chinese outside China are straightforwardly coping, starting with their patron saint Gordon Chang and the COVID refugee cohort that had accepted a permanent QoL hit in emigration and thus sustains itself with news of the coming Chinese collapse. Whereas most Chinese dissidents, in my experience, are straight up mentally ill (excluding eg. Ai Weiwei), and there's no talking to them. I've visited a local Falun Dafa branch, the food was okay, but my takeaway was «wow, if the MSS ran this thing, they'd find little to improve for the purposes of lulling the US into complacency». That's the nervous system of the overseas anti-CCP Chinese and much of the Western conservative media, their newspapers informing Republican policymaking – a hive of loudly insane religious freaks who couldn't cut it in China. It had put some things into perspective for me.
It's also quite condescending to assume that a foreigner, one from a former Communist country at that, is naively engaging with «tightly controlled PR». Your homeland's PR is hilariously tone-deaf and transparent; if the MSS or whatever were employing people like me, they'd get much further, but they treat propaganda as a sinecure for officials' failsons. My opinion is based on primary sources, not on «PR». I can literally see who's doing what, with what dependencies, with what labor, and the Chinese are doing about 50% of the interesting stuff in the world, delivering us the world that's moving forward twice as fast.
Mainly because the average quality of Americans and the Chinese doesn't matter so much – institutions that serve as the bottlenecks do. The CCP imposes some standards of competence and prosociality, as opposed to the American beauty pageant, and Xi in particular is like 3 standard deviations above Trump in personal integrity, which has effects downstream. Xi's ministers are humans, Trump's are weird hypebeasts; Xi's policies are motivated by long-term rational self-interests, Trump's by petty cruelty and delusions, therefore the Chinese in aggregate become more predictable and more reliable partners. This is trivially obvious to a neutral observer from going through their biographies and watching their actions, and actions of both countries, for several years.
If I were a Maoist Third Worldist, I would not be saying that China is not really Communist.
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