If the U.S. were a healthy, reasonably democratic capitalist society, its superiority compared to “communist” (actually: authoritarian state capitalist) China would be self evident. The tens of thousands of students from mainland China studying here, exposed to a not merely richer but fairer and more appealing society, would return to China determined to fight for democatic rights there.
Actually, that used to happen far more than it happens today. In China today that struggle is not open but is absolutely real. At present our own failures as a society, our absurd internal divisions, and our own ruling elites’ obvious greed, lower our system’s moral authority. Many U.S. politicians’ inaccurate, partisan & hostile view of everyday life in mainland China, our country’s unfair and aggressive foreign policies towards even our ostensible “allies,” also lower the appeal of American style government to thoughtful Chinese students.
Chinese mainland students here are hardly all the same. They never have been. If today they tend to see their own one party system as more competent and “meritocratic” despite its obvious authoritarianism, if they see their leaders as more rational and far-sighted than ours, whose fault is that?