The Chinese students with the education and wealth to study abroad are already among the top 5% in China. Their families are wealthy and powerful to start with. It's not shocking that many of them see negatives to living in the west as compared to China (in the west, they are on a more level playing field with the "masses").
Their experience does not translate to the remaining 95% who work manual jobs, with highly filtered information coming in, with no real hope or means of ever traveling abroad.
From my experience there are two tiers of international student. There are the ones who emigrate in late middle school/early high school to get permanent residency before entering university (and thus paying domestic tuition) and those who come over right at the beginning of university. The latter category pay exorbitant tuition and, from what I’ve seen, drive fancy cars and wear luxury designer brands. These kids have more money than they know what to do with. Their parents are likely to be at least somewhat involved in the CCP and so it makes sense that they’d be unimpressed with their western peers.
For Urban Population I would argue the percentage is a bit higher. It’s not that uncommon for 3rd tier city children to go abroad nowadays.
If you are talking about the billions of rural area population, it’s a hard problem and I think they wouldn’t have the spare time to learn or think about democracy values until their lives get better. Their dream is still “get out of my village and find a spot in Tier-3/2/1 city”.
Its a bit “何不食肉糜” (let them eat cake) to Chinese people actually
Their experience does not translate to the remaining 95% who work manual jobs, with highly filtered information coming in, with no real hope or means of ever traveling abroad.