[tcrews]

Two years ago, two colleagues from China came to visit (South American country) on a business trip (mostly training and technical discussions).

I took them to a nice restaurant after a day of meetings. I said something about the censorship being bad after they said they couldn't access some websites I mentioned.

They answered a nervous "It's ok" and an awkward silence followed. I sensed they had a lot of things to say about that but even 6000km+ away from China, they still didn't feel comfortable voicing any concerns.

[uiuiuop]

I was just in China and when I first met my colleagues they started to tell me what I would need to bypass the Great Firewall.

Also, just about every taxi I took, the taxi driver would complain about the government.

Maybe your colleagues just didn't want to talk about it in a professional setting?

[seanmcdirmid]

Taxi drivers, especially in Beijing, are a subversive bunch. People with money are more vested in the system, so for the fuerdai, it isn't just brainwashing, they are protecting their interests.

[tcrews]

It seems like this matches my experience. My colleagues were directors at an American multinational with a presence in China. From what I could gather, they led a pretty sweet life there.

[vilhelm_s]

There's a paper that uses a quite cool trick to try to measure how much people mask their true opinions and stick to the government line. One of their conclusion is that it happens more for people of high socioeconomic status (as opposed to taxi drivers).

> We first draw reader’s attention to the upper left quadrant of the graph. In some sense, this quadrant can be called “liars” quadrant, as the divergence between expressed and actual support are greater for these groups than the sample average (in other words, more intense falsification). Four groups are located in this quadrant: (1) wealthy individuals (the top 20% of the local income percentile),16 (2) frequent internet users,17 (3) those with college-level education or above,18 and (4) state sector employees. Memberships in the first three categories are highly correlated.19 Together, they represent a segment of the Chinese society that is intelligent, informed and with relatively high socioeconomic status. Based on our conjectures of information access, it is not entirely surprising that these groups hold the greatest distrust in the official anticorruption narrative. Individuals with higher levels of education are typically more capable of critically processing information from the political authority. Frequent internet users could easily get access to overseas websites that discussed the power-struggle aspect of the purge. The economically better-off class probably had an extra bit of sympathy for Chen as many of them might have made their fortune under his administration (note the very negative coefficient on actual support for this group). Yet, the fact they are also among the groups that voiced the highest expressed support–a sharp contrast to their own vocal, active style as documented by many existing studies (King et al., 2013; Yang, 2013)—is somewhat counterintuitive. This pattern of behavior is nonetheless consistent with our second conjecture: These groups, by virtue of their better economic conditions, typically had much more to lose from state sanctions than those from lower social strata. At the same time, their intelligence and information probably also gave them a better understanding of the risks associated with expressing dissident views in a moment of high politically sensitivity. As a result, while members of these groups might be outspoken in times when revealing true preferences bears little political cost, they can be extremely cautious about the views they express when the political atmosphere is tightened.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2564413