To censor or to engage: what should one do?

Hello guys, I'm doing a follow up on my last post to Russian people being brainwashed and it really hit home when one of my regular readers (let's refer him as Mr Zhu) turned out to be totally brainwashed as well - this time by the state-controlled media in China. Chinese is his first language thus he prefers consuming news from China in Chinese rather than struggle on in English, but that means he is only getting the Chinese government approved version of the story. I mentioned the 1989 Tiananmen massacre as well as the current genocide happening in Xinjiang and sure enough, he disagreed with me denying that neither events happened and Mr Zhu then in turn accused me of being brainwashed by the Western media. I am then faced with a difficult decision: do I get into an argument (that will presumably go nowhere) with him about which version of the story is the reality and which one is but government propaganda? Or do I simply ban him from my blog's comment section because I find him guilty of spreading fake news? I had initially went for compromise solution: I approved his original comment but told him that he was wrong - I did that because I wanted to demonstrate that brainwashed people are everywhere, even amongst my readers. Then my reader Sandra requested that I delete that comment for Mr Zhu was spreading fake news and that we really ought to take a stance against it. Well, she convinced me that it was the right thing to do as I wasn't prepared to spend that much time and energy trying to convince Mr Zhu that he was wrong given that he was adamant that he was right and I was totally wrong - he then even left a few more really long comments in both English and Chinese, which I have all just deleted. So Sandra and I are left in our echo chamber where we can agree with each other all day long but was that the right thing to do in this situation?  

Allow me to compare this to the fruitless negotiations that are going on between Russia and Ukraine at the moment: I just don't see how it is going to end the war if Russia's conditions for stopping all the killing include a complete, unconditional surrender by the Ukrainians, for the Ukrainians to give up their democratically elected government and to accept either a puppet government which will do Putin's bidding or even accept direct rule from Moscow. Under such conditions, I don't think any good would come out of such negotiations and if they get Russia to agree to some humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to escape the worst hit areas, then that's already a good thing. By the same token, Mr Zhu is essentially demanding that I admit that I'm completely wrong, that I've been completely brainwashed by Western media all my life and that his version of events like the Tiananmen massacre and the Uighur genocide is the truth - if I accept his terms, then he will continue reading my blog, if not then he will stop reading my blog and he might tell others to boycott my blog. Now you know why I am comparing this 'negotiation' to the talks happening between Russia and Ukraine at the moment - let's be clear, Mr Zhu isn't interested in hearing what I have to say about the issue. He is offering me an ultimatum: either you believe what I tell you and admit you're wrong or you will lose me as a reader. Hence it was under such circumstances, that I chose to tell him never to come back to my blog again and that all his future comments will be deleted. You simply can't try to argue or reason with someone who has no intention in even starting that process with you: Ukraine cannot just walk away from this war with Russia but in contrast I have the luxury of simply blocking Mr Zhu. 

Allow me to contrast this to the kind of interactions I have with another reader Sandra: she and I share a lot in common. After all, we are both from Singapore, we are both married to British guys and we both live in North London. We both studied in the UK and thus we both know what it is like to adjust to life in the UK after having grown up in Singapore. In fact, I think she probably lives about 8 km away from me, not far away at all. Nonetheless, Sandra and I don't always agree on many issues but what often follows is a frank and honest exchange of opinions - I am interested in what she has to say and in return, she listens to what I have to say on the issue. I am not convinced that I can change her mind on the issue if we happen to disagree, but all I want to do is to make her aware of how others may have a different perspective on that issue and for her to take those other perspectives into account, that's all. I think both Sandra and I are both aware of the fact that we are probably never going to win any arguments with the "I'm 100% right and you're 100% wrong" approach - that's why we're quite happy to agree to disagree whilst hearing the other party's opinion in a respectful manner. If Mr Zhu wanted to challenge my perception that the Chinese communist party was downright evil, then he could have tried Sandra's approach and then I would have been happy to discuss the issue with him. But no, he didn't go down that route and thus I felt like I had very little to gain from any further interactions with him if that was his stance, he wasn't willing to engage me, he wanted to lecture me so trying to engage him was not going to be easy at all. 

Now is this simply a question of poor social skills on the part of Mr Zhu? Quite possibly. In a recent post, I talked about two people (my father and a former colleague) who had terrible social skills - so even in circumstances when they were right and had a very valid argument, they were so abrasive in the way they presented their argument that most people just didn't want to listen to them; or at the very least, they would be so distracted by their poor social skills that any reason to do with the argument would have been lost in the process. Admittedly, Mr Zhu is trying to express himself in his second language English and his first language is Chinese - now believe me, I do want to be sympathetic here. I am currently dealing with a client in Peru at the moment and all our communication has been done entirely in Spanish which is my fourth language (after English, French and Mandarin). Sometimes the client would leave me a voice note on Whatsapp and it's not even like an email I can just bung into Google translate, she would speak so quickly that I struggle to understand every word and I worry that I may miss out something very important if I didn't understand everything she said. So yes, I know exactly what the challenges are when it comes to a social or business interaction which are not conducted in your mother tongue/first language. And to be fair to Mr Zhu, he wasn't rude or aggressive or anything like that - no, it just that he didn't demonstrate any interest to engage me as an equal - it is important to be polite of course but that's not the same as being persuasive. So whilst Mr Zhu was polite but didn't know how to present a cogent, persuasive argument at all. It is so much harder to be persuasive than to be polite and he doesn't realizes the difference. 

Another reason why any kind of discussion with Mr Zhu is going to be problematic is the Dunning Kruger effect: Mr Zhu is oblivious to the fact that he doesn't have the skills to persuade someone like me to change my mind and accept his point of view. There's a huge difference between him simply telling me what he thinks and him being able to get me to change my mind on the issue - I accept that there are people like him in East Asia who accept the Chinese Communist Party's version of events, the same way there are many millions of Russians at the moment who believe Putin's version of events about why they are at war with Ukraine at the moment. However, what Mr Zhu doesn't seem to realize is that just because he accepts the Chinese government's version of events doesn't mean that I would just take the same default stance: we need to start with the languages we consume our news in. Mr Zhu primarily consumes his news in Chinese whereas for someone like me who speaks 25 languages, I consume my news from a whole range of sources, from different countries, in different languages. How we respond to the news is also hugely influenced by our education and our life experiences; needless to say, Mr Zhu and I are very different people in this aspect. There is a safety announcement that we often hear on the London Underground: 'mind the gap between the train and the platform'. The version in Singapore is 'mind the platform gap'. In this case, Mr Zhu needs to mind the gap and he is clearly oblivious to the massive gulf between his perception of the world and mine, so how am I even supposed to begin to engage someone like that when he isn't even aware of the gap? Is he oblivious to the fact that my point of view will be different? 

I wonder if any of my readers is going to turn around and berate me for missing this opportunity to try to engage Mr Zhu on the issue - could I have at least opened his eyes to the other side of the story? The song 'A Whole New World' comes to mind, should my mission be to bring this whole new world to Mr Zhu if he is already a regular reader and there is clearly a gap in his knowledge? This then begs the next question: whose responsibility is it to educate Mr Zhu then? Should it be his parents? His teachers at school and university? His colleagues and employers? Or Mr Zhu himself? This is a rhetorical question of course: Mr Zhu needs to be responsible for educating himself and if there are gaps in his knowledge, then it is not my responsibility to try to fix the problem. I can't possibly fix every gap in his knowledge via my blog - that was never the intention nor purpose of my blog. Only he can decide if he wishes to do anything about the gaps in his knowledge. Furthermore, you know the saying, "you can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink." It is one thing offering Mr Zhu an explanation on a topic like "why do ordinary Russians support Putin's war in Ukraine" but realistically, that's as far as I would go - the blog post is the water, whether or not the horse chooses to drink it is the horse's choice at the end of the day. If it had been someone closer to me like my nephew who has such a massive gap in his knowledge, then yeah, I might feel a lot more obliged and motivated to try to do something to rectify that situation. But if this is a reader in Macau whom I am highly unlikely to ever meet then I can choose to just walk away from the problem.

There has been a report in the news about how Russian speaking volunteers in various countries like Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia have been cold calling Russian people to try to engage them in a conversation about the war in Ukraine, in a desperate bid to try to get them to look beyond the Russian government's propaganda. It is a valiant undertaking of course but I feel for the volunteers who are having a really hard time. Most Russian people just hang up on them and don't want to talk about it, whilst others simply echo what the lies have been fed by the Russian media. I have mixed feelings about this: on one hand, sure I want to encourage the volunteers who are doing everything they can to help end the war in Ukraine. These people can't go fight on the front line in Ukraine so they are doing what they can by engaging Russian people through the phone lines. But on the other hand, it must feel like you're trying to drain a lake with a teaspoon. So even if you are engaging people on the matter, you lift your eyes and look across the lake, it can feel like you've not made any difference at all given how much water there is in that lake! Then you realize, even if I lived a thousand years and kept on doing this everyday for a thousand years, I would still never ever empty that lake with just a little teaspoon. This is just mission impossible - how the hell am I supposed to ever succeed in this process? Thus hypothetically speaking, let's say I somehow manage to change Mr Zhu's mind on the issue, what real difference does that make when there are so many millions of other Chinese people who are completely brainwashed by the Chinese Community Party? That would be just me having taken one teaspoon of water out of a massive lake, so even if you have accomplished something that's remarkable, in the end, it doesn't really make any difference at all and that is depressing. 

So there you go, that's it from me on this issue. Would you have tried to engage Mr Zhu on this occasion or not? Am I simply creating my own echo chamber by choosing not to engage him or am I being sensible in picking my battles? What kind of attitudes have you encountered in recent days when it comes to talking about the invasion of Ukraine? Have you encountered very misinformed or brainwashed people? Please do leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.