Its like Hillary walking into a working class kitchen for the first time.
They’ve been shielded from even critical support of China and other AES for so long they literally, not figuratively, literally cannot process that people exist that have beliefs that aren’t Reddit Approved. They immediately assume it’s bots or wumao. Human beings can’t possibly hold these beliefs, so they must be Oriental hordes or actual robots.
I honestly don’t care if western neoliberal countries see themselves as democracies or not, or if they are democracies or not, since that’s not really my grievance with them anyway. However, in China the idea of democracy that is promoted by the Xi himself is one of majority rule, the same way nearly everybody uses the term. That’s the standard that Chinese people are going to be inclined to measure their government against, especially since their government has actively invited them to think of democracy in those terms.
Quoting Xi: “Whether a country is a democracy or not depends on whether its people are really the masters of the country. Democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems the people want to solve.” (from a central conference speech he made in 2021, you can probably find the whole thing if you look)
That doesn’t sound far off from “western” notions of democracy, does it? That’s the idea of democracy that they’re being “indoctrinated” with over there, and what the vast majority of Chinese citizens believe their government lives up to.