The thing that most needed explaining to a westerner is the great firewall of china and lack of freedom of speech. The argument that was made was foreign media dominance would result in 1 billion people being too unwieldy to effectively govern. Without it you have literal peasants with no education being directly exposed to potential (and probable) western manipulation. That manipulation could be political (overthrow the government) or economic (buy American goods) and the cost is direct exploitation of Chinese people and a failure of society to operate at scale. Words like century of humiliation, opium, forced open, and the like were used here too. Western exploitation and manipulation of China is not taught or explained in American schools, nor is it really taught that western powers came in and ransacked the country, to what extent they did, nor the mechanisms by which they (we) did it.

The standout paradigm shift for me was the statement "we want to democratize, but we cannot because our public is uneducated, you cannot have democracy without education." After seeing Hong Kong, I decide that I don't really believe china wants to democratize and this was likely a lie the person I talked to believed themselves, but I believe in the second half of the statement. Growing up in America you never really analyze democracy or its properties, you just understand that it's good and the correct way of life as any good indoctrination will do. Live free or die. A pretty important property of democracy to consider is that it will function as well as the half of its most poorly educated people. It doesn't take much observation of how bad faith republicans are to see the consequences of a society dominated by its least educated people. There is a clear tradeoff between individual sacrifices of rights and the well being of society overall that I think can be argued for successfully here even if I disagree with it personally. Not being the dominant culture ups the stakes on loose controls.

The overall idea of protectionism being necessary but unideal was compelling to me. The overall idea of hard limitations on how society can operate based on the properties of that society was compelling to me. There was a mental shift from right and wrong, to pros and cons and tradeoffs, which is much more healthy discussion to be having.

Another key concept that was explained was the idea of planned vs actual corruption. It was explained that there is a planned acceptable level of corruption in China, and that this is mostly seen as lubrication, a guarantee, or a bounty to get stuff done. Unfortunately, rather than corruption growing linearly in a planned way, it was growing exponentially in an unplanned way and this was causing problems.

The IP theft was somewhat of a "your country was built on it, too" thing. There was a bit of "you have so much, you should share." Somewhat similar with the "we were colonized, now we want to colonize" idea. I think there was a bit of "you wield power or it gets wielded against you." I don't agree at all, but returning abuse you've received onto the world is an unfortunately human thing to do.

I would not utter the words Taiwan, Uighur, Tibet, or Falun Gong while in China, because that seems foolish, so I didn't get any kind of satisfying explanation for those, and there probably isn't one that would be acceptable or satisfying. I suspect at best the explanation would be "look what America did to native Americans," or other justification by precedent.

China knows it benefits from outside experts and it has 1000 talents and other things to get Chinese people, especially, back in the country, but with english being nil, and a culture that is fairly anti-foreigner that is an uphill battle, so there was significant worry about the pace of innovation.

There was a bit of reference to the term "locusts" (not by me) and the reputation Chinese tourists have. There was a fair amount of acknowledgement but also explanation of sudden wealth growth and historic lack of education resulting in low class behavior.

Some of the more high profile IP theft cases (vials in bags) were explained by the idea that that behavior had been consistently happening and it was understood by all parties involved that it was happening, until one day feds showed up. I didn't buy that so much.

There was also a fair amount of "we're nobodies, so we're not at risk" talk when it comes to speech, but I can't operate in a society like that because it's far too much exposure to vulnerability.

I got a mild run down of some of the mechanics of corruption, good faith corruption, and bad faith corruption.

I definitely started to get a lot of the understanding that dealing with the incredible amounts of poverty, dealing with large amounts of systemic corruption, dealing with entrenched power structures, and balancing that against hostile foreign super powers that would almost certainly exploit you was a pretty incredible task. As evil as I think china (the government) is for what it is doing, when you look at its struggles it paints a picture you have to respect, it gives a lot of empathy to the struggles of a Chinese well edcuated person, it makes you feel empathy for the average ignorant person.

I think of all the takeaways I had it was just how significant fear was as a primary policy motivator. Generally, unethical behavior is understood to be a product of unchecked ambition and therefore comically evil, but the idea that most of the unethical behavior is motivated out of fear was fairly compelling.