Critical Thinking Part 2

The majority of my students are civil, polite and, very often generous. They are capable of critical and indeed creative thinking and it is in them I can see a positive future for China and, indeed, for all of us. However, they do not reflect society here as a whole and while even the most nationalistic and patriotic of my students temper those sentiments with a willingness to listen to others, this is not always the case and among educated youth in the big cities there is an underlying intolerance of any criticism from outside, an intolerance that is reflected in an increasing xenophobia.
This is not surprising in a country where the media is still monopolised and largely censored. Most Chinese assume that governments in the west control opinion much in the same way as their government does and that any criticism of the Chinese government in, for instance, the USA media means that all the people in the United States are criticising 1.35 billion people. With limited access to independent media they fail to comprehend that people abroad might be looking at an array of arguments before reaching their conclusions. Of course, people abroad are not always doing this and the gutter press in the west can be almost as clumsy as the "China Daily". Nevertheless, while CNN and BBC World are only slightly more sophisticated than CCTV, there is a type of crude propaganda here that leaves you thinking, "surely that doesn't influence people?" However, it does and I am sure that if China were to invade some country tomorrow to secure its oil supplies, you would not get millions of demonstrators onto the streets.
The picture above gives you an example of the type of crude propaganda that people are exposed to.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/69ffade2-185f-11dd-8c92-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=723ba534-41c2-11dc-8328-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1