It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such a hard time with this.
Do they not teach comparative history in schools anymore?
While its certainly at least authoritarian and perhaps an actual dictatorship, and I recognize that the ruling party still calls itself “the Communist Party of China”, still we wouldn't be talking about Tencent if it actually was a Communist (defined, most centrally, by the prohibition in private ownership of the means of production) dictatorship.
The difference aren't that great. The most heavily surveiled society on earth is britain.
> It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such a hard time with this.
And it's confounding how the older generation thinks the west is any better.
> Do they not teach comparative history in schools anymore?
They do but just a lot better than they did in the past.
Maybe they understand the differences between a representative democracy and an authoritarian regime in theory but believe there's no real difference in practice. It's a deeply unfortunate type of cynicism.
It used to be every generation of Americans had its subset of youth who become infatuated with Communism, for example. They generally grow out of it and come to appreciate their global standing once they graduate college and accumulate some wealth.
Europeans are accustomed to being more mobile and studying abroad seems to be almost expected. America is a very insular culture by comparison; depending on academic program a lot of schools don't have meaningful study abroad programs ("let's go spend a week attending some lectures in London then go home") and support for things like working holiday visas is pathetic. We don't have anything like Erasmus. The only people I ever seem to meet who have traveled more than a few hundred miles from home have only done so on deployment with the military.
In aggregate we know virtually nothing about the rest of the world, so it's easy for disillusioned kids to be convinced that their minor dissatisfactions are on the level of human rights violations and that North Korea or ISIS-held Syria are favorable by comparison.
Oh look, more ageism on hacker news.
Or they have adopted a realistic view of history. The US has done loads of shitty things.
They have never had stalin like purges or a hitler like dictator.
An educated person, old or young, might look at Iran and be less likely to think "horrible regime hell bent on the destruction of Israel and the west" and more likely to think "huh, we probably shouldn't have fucked with their government decades ago".
Also that whole thing about voting being worth less for huge chunks of the country. Oh, and getting constantly screwed over by previous generations.
Being cynical doesn't make you naive.
Every generation everywhere feels they've been "screwed over" by their parents, or their parents' parents. You lack perspective.
Note that there are bad people and bad emperors and everything in between, having vastly different abilities to affect people. They are hardly equivalent, though bad they all are.