True, but they also want their young people to get the best quality education available, especially in STEM, which is currently (and probably not forever) disproportionately situated in America.
No free speech. It hurts their educational systems very deeply. They also have a culture of bribing/gifting, from middle school up into the business world and government.
It all boils down to the government wanting to hold onto Asian culture, avoid conflict, keep control and save face.
They view democracy as America's attempt to insert a US-friendly leader. Democracies are arguably the best peace keepers humanity has ever seen, however, China does not view it this way.
This is my perspective after living in SE Asia for 2 years and Taiwan for 2 years. I travel through China occasionally.
> Democracies are arguably the best peace keepers humanity has ever seen,
You might want to examine that belief, and how you acquired it. Evidence for it in the historical record is not exactly abundant.
(Feel free to dig back 25 centuries, and start by looking up how the Athenian democracy went around kicking their neighbors' butts, as told by one of the Athenian generals, a fair-minded bloke. Thucydides' Melian dialogue is the magic string.)
Didn't Athens fall because their democratic government assigned too little tax money to military? That's what happened in first Polish democracy (XV-XVIII centuries).
Only a small fraction of the Chinese admitted into Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford return after their education. Neither does most of Google and Facebook employees who are born in China. The brightest talents of China serve the United States mostly (even though the US places a lot of handicap on them, e.g. the cap on H1B). Can you now imagine why Chinese government is not incentivized?
That's not as good for China as these students building businesses within China, however.
We all see the benefits of China preparing its students better. China isn't fully on the same page yet.
Since reopening trade relations with the US in the 70s after Kissinger's visits, they've only gradually benefited from increased relations. Their growth is constrained by the government's stranglehold on the internet and media. People are constantly jailed for speech that would be considered innocuous in the West.
Many native English speakers will go to China to work as English teachers, but there are not enough teachers to cover all of China. There are so many Chinese people that huge swaths of them will never be directly educated by a native English speaker. Some of these kids enter into American schools, and this post and thread is the result. Students cheat as they realize they're in way over their heads, and the rest of us get annoyed at the devaluation of our degrees and industries. Industries are hurt when unqualified folks are hired based on a supposedly legitimate degree.
