Why mainland students in US don’t sympathise with Hong Kong protesters
- Many Chinese mainland students in the US enjoy broad access to news and Western social mores, but still oppose the protests in Hong Kong
- That is largely because they value economic success and political stability over personal freedom
Brian Shan says the way he views the world has been reshaped since he arrived in the United States to study seven years ago.
The 30-year-old Beijing native, working on a PhD in materials engineering at an Ivy League university, has come to understand that walking naked in Times Square could be a freedom-of-expression gesture.
He accepts that same-sex marriage is no different from men marrying women. He gets news from both CNN and China’s state-backed People’s Daily and navigates on social media platforms both within and beyond China’s Great Firewall.
His broad exposure to US culture has changed him in many ways: the biggest personal shift came in 2013, Shan said, when he went from “believing in myself to believing in God”.
Even so, these changes are not big enough to make Shan sympathise with the Hong Kong protesters, whose months-long anti-government demonstrations have developed into a wider pro-democracy movement.
“Those who are brainwashed are them [Hong Kong protesters]. They think they need democracy but what they really need is to have a better life,” said Shan, who became emotional when recalling a recent spat with a church friend over Hong Kong.
