I was on Doc Malik's podcast a few weeks ago, and he threw a pile of questions at me about China.

I had warned him in advance that it would be pointless. Most people are not interested in the truth; they are only interested in defending the narrative they already hold.

He meant well, but the problem with almost every China conversation is where it starts.

The framing.

Westerners open from the assumption that something is wrong with the country, before anyone has actually said anything.

Right off the bat, it is a communist totalitarian hellhole, and that description gets offered as settled background rather than as a position somebody holds. It is the product of decades of propaganda.

So every conversation about China begins with a picture of the place already fully formed.

How can any discussion about China be meaningful on those terms?

Worse still, the loudest critics tend to be the ones who call themselves "awake", yet have never been there or questioned their own views. Instead, they maintain the mainstream narrative.

I ended up in China as part of a documentary team, drawn in by Pepe Escobar, who is an old-school journalist in the best sense and was writing a book about the ancient Silk Road and the current Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The two infrastructures overlap.