It's entirely possible to support one's government overall while disagreeing with many of the things it does. I support the US government as a whole, but I think many of it's policies concerning Iraq, Guantanamo, the "War on Drugs," immigration, etc. are despicable.
I think the same holds true for most of China's citizens. Most certainly realize that the government does bad things but this is far outweighed by the good things that it has done for the country in terms of economics development and stability.
Remember that a majority of China's population remembers a time when starvation was a very real risk and most were resigned to a future as subsistence farmer's living in a commune. Then realize that for someone who has lived through that to where China is now in terms of economic opportunity, free speech is just not that big of an issue.
Edit:
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that there's a necessary trade-off between economic development and free speech. My point is that most of China's population is too busy celebrating the miracle of development to care about free speech. Instead of taking for granted that economic development happened, they still remember the very real prospect that it might not have happened and still see improvement's that can be had there.
My impression is that the "nationalists" (as in blind patriotism, the word has a different meaning in Chinese) are a vocal minority among the priviledged urban youths who grew up during the economic boom. The older generations who lived through Mao's days, the less priviedged middle-class kids, and the rural population tend to have very mixed opinions.
Also, Chinese opinions tend to be very mixed to begin with, which can give off the wrong impression to someone from a society that is used to partisanism.
This artwork portrays "opinions" among German and Chinese very well:
Because the rest of the world doesn't like free speech? Americans may throw the term around more often, but I wouldn't equate holding it important to nationalism. If anything, American nationalism has forced free speech on America, not the other way around (and yes, I'm aware of the many failures. Not saying it's perfect).
In America there is not any particular issue that is so contentious that free speech is actually curtailed. But there is tremendous social pressure for people to voluntarily curtail certain forms of speech.
If the US had a less stable society, chances are certain kinds of speech would be considered more dangerous, and we'd progress from certain forms being considered socially inappropriate to being banned outright.
This has happened in our past... and the usual framing of it is that we've progressed past such mistakes. In reality the pressures that force such things have abated.
I'd be interested to see what happened with free speech during the civil war days... I really don't know, no class has covered it and k-12 grade school has made me sick of US-history (flat-out fabrications and ridiculous exaggerations in tons of cases, and super super super dry info with few connections for the remaining). It'd be a good measuring point for this, though, as that's about as unstable as you can get. Yeah, slave-free-speech was blocked, but that's arguably mostly because they weren't really viewed as people, thus didn't have that right in the first place.
From talking to people born in China that live\study in the U.S. One would predict they wouldn't support the PRC as highly on virtue of having left it and perhaps being better educated. But everyone I've met seems to.
Why don't all their high speed hackers turn against the gov, then? They have a lot of the gov's power, plus anonymity afforded by the medium of attack.
I haven't read Manufacturing Consent, but I did try to read Hegemony or Survival. It was an exercise in frustration and ultimately I didn't finish. Chomsky, on the rare occasions when he does back up his assertions with references, almost invariably references only himself. Combine that with a bombastic style that yet still manages to be obtuse, boring, and repetitive, and it's a recipe for a disastrous book that can convince only those who are already convinced and angry and looking for an argument from authority.
It sounds like Manufacturing Consent has an interesting thesis. I would like to read more about it but preferably from someone more readable, more scholarly, and less prone to hyperbole and unsupported claims.
While I'm neither a Marxist nor a Chomskyite-anarcho-syndicalist, I have read Manufacturing Consent, and I'd say it's a pretty straight-forward application of Gramsci's theory of hegemony to the United States. Gramsci, the leader of the Italian Communist Party, wrote his theory while in jail, outlining two forms of domination: direct coercion, and rule through civil society. Hegemony is the latter—the production of seemingly spontaneous consent for the policies of the (capitalist-controlled) state. The capitalist ruling class accomplishes this through the production of an intellectual class and related institution that support and justify the current order. The public absorbs these ideas and narratives and thus consents to the exploitative capitalist order.
Chomsky just applied that idea to the United States during the Cold War (although I'm sure he would say it's still applicable). The capitalists control the corporate media, they set up foundations that fund think tanks, they lobby the government. All reporting is dependent on advertising from corporations that won't brook deviations from the current order. So an overall discourse is created in the U.S. by corporate control which makes sure the debate stays within certain bounds of dissent, but never goes so far as to be dangerous to the capitalist system.
If you don't buy Gramscianism and don't see capitalists as capable of running society's discourse in a coordinated and conspiratorial manner, you probably won't buy Manufacturing Consent's argument.
On a side note, I was reading it in a Starbucks in London in 2003 during the run-up to the Iraq War. A Canadian reporter approached me for the purpose of interviewing me about the Iraq War, simply because I was reading Chomsky. She was hoping to get an anti-war quote from an angry young Brit, but was surprised that I was American. An interesting selection bias on the part of the reporter.
I haven't read Manufacturing Consent, but I did try to read Hegemony or Survival.
Big mistake. Note the difference in publishing dates. References in Manufacturing Consent are backed up by things like "column inches per unit time in the New York Times." Also note that he is not the only author of _Manufacturing Consent_.
You remind me of an old USENET poster who used the logic: "I didn't read X by author, but I read Y, and it sucked, therefore X must suck."
Sorry, but that only has a passing resemblance to real logic.
Yeah, because he's writing a comment on a message board. Read some Chomsky. He's a brilliant linguist, but his political screeds are ridiculous, he takes a set of somewhat reasonable assumptions and then builds layer upon layer on top of them as if they were bedrock or something, then winds up with a ludicrous, self-serving conclusion. (and this is coming from someone on the left side of the aisle)
I've read his political work, but I don't think any of what the OP said is really true. For example, the claim that Chomsky only (or mostly) cites himself is simply false. You can check this for yourself by looking at the notes for Hegemony or Survival on books.google.com:
There are only a handful of references to work by Chomsky, and all are perfectly legitimate (i.e. they're not being used as a substitute for citing independent sources). The vast majority of the references are to newspaper articles and books by other authors.
On the contrary, the freedom is something very new and fragile in our civilization, and always people had to fight it quite hard. It's our ignorance that we take freedom for granted in western societies, and staying in this comfort zone may unfortunately lead us to loosing it.
