My therapist made a comment about how China is a failed socialist experiment because they have 2-3 year olds working in factories. I responded “So we’ve been told.” She looks at me like I’m crazy. (Not a great look for a therapist) “I’ve not seen any evidence of that.”
“Because they’re such a closed country!”
“Which means you have no evidence to your point either?”
“Well, missionaries… anyway!”
It’s always bizarrely funny to me when someone’s conception of a foreign country is frozen in the era when they grew up. Like a guy I knew who, when I tried to explain that Japan is a semi-colony of the US, responded “actually the US is a semi-colony of Japan because they make all our electronics and could paralyze our economy by cutting us off from trade.”
This guy after learning the bubble burst:
my parents’ generation grew up hearing some variation of “finish your dinner, because there are starving children in China” and they can’t really let go of when they were kids and it was one of the poorest countries in the world