> Just because you love healthy food doesn't mean you go around on the street shoving salad in people's mouths.

It's not a personal lifestyle choice or "culture". All human babies get born with a lot of curiosity and vitality. Some get broken and develop a pathological need for external validation to compensate something that never can compensate, instead of a grounding from which they can cooperate (and yes, that can mean following commands sometimes, but there's still an adult and a slave way of going about that, and if you were to say being a slave is a lifestyle choice then I'd just decide eating slaves is my lifestyle choice). That's not a matter of taste as far as I can tell, and if they defend their stunted development they by definition attack what I consider mental health, muddling it into some kind of thing nobody gets to have an opinion on until laws are broken. Not doing that. I see what I see, if you don't like what I have to say say something you think is better, but don't think I care about numbers of people. So far, I heard only "most people are happy". Not even "they are happy because", and not a PEEP how that outweighs those who are persecuted. It's literally just pointing to a blob. That's also something I see, and it's a sickness. Nothing to do with China, it's everywhere. But it's foolish in China, too.

There were people who got along fine in the GDR, too. I don't really blame them, I don't want to know how I would rate under such a regime. But really, when I want to know what the underbelly of the GDR was like, I don't ask them first, and certainly I wouldn't dream of only asking them.

Yeah, it's all subjective but that also gains us nothing because the subjective feelings of a billion Chinese don't outweigh my own subjective feelings. If they can't articulate why they feel that way, and can't interact with further responses to that, that doesn't surprise me at all.

You're basically saying -- maybe you don't want to say that, but that's what all this means, that's what matters in this -- it's good the people in the article and others are in jail or worse. Because to say otherwise would be "forcing my preferences on others"... how dare you, really. This isn't about whether someone likes the New Kids on the Block or Take That more. A million people who just go along to get along are not worth one person in jail for trying to be an individual. And you don't get to shove jail bars in their face because you can't stand words, even though you're so sloppy with those, too.

> Which I'm pretty sure you can interpret as

Yeah, I can, if I pretend "majority of people in China" means "me and my friends". But I can also read it as it's written, as opposed to sentences like "I think X because of Y".

> Unless you country is void of any problems or internal conflict, you've missed the point.

Not only did I not missed it, I addressed it. It's an invalid criticism in my books. A person isn't allowed to only speak up about anything in another country unless their country is "void of any problems" -- what would that even mean? That's like saying you can't write using any letters but square circles. That's not a point, it's just sophistry.

And as a bonus, it would also mean a person from $X doesn't get to criticize a person from $X for criticizing $X unless their country is perfect. Be HN US centric or international, it certainly is not within the great Firewall of China, right? So wouldn't a Chinese person make their country perfect and everybody in it immortal before ever criticizing a non-Chinese person? As I said, I find those demands completely arbitrary and void. But if some thinks they're valid, they should heed them themselves.