Arthur Kroeber

Then the classes that I did after COVID had set in, they weren't doing these study tours, so no one in the class had been to China as part of the program.

And kind of luck of the draw, I didn't find any people who had been there as part of work or whatever.

So I had zero direct experience of China in the class for a couple of years.

And the baseline view of what China was was, A, way more negative.

And be much more stylized and, dare I say, cartoonish.

That they were essentially getting their view formed entirely by whatever they were picking up in the media and from their preconceptions.

And there was no check on that.

And so I saw in just a very, very, very small but very concrete way that if you don't have people going back and forth and there aren't some people in the mix who say, wait a second, what you're saying doesn't make any sense because I was there and I saw this and it's totally different, right?

That, I'm convinced, has gigantic impact.

And I think it's really, really damaging if people in positions of authority –

in our government and our political system refuse to expose themselves to the actual reality of what China is, which is essentially what they're doing now by making it politically impossible for anyone to go to China and see what's going on there.

That is a very, very dangerous place to be.

It's ignorance.

And one of the things that drove me and many sort of China, Western China types crazy about being in China for many, many years is you would go

And frequently, you would have this experience.

You'd be sitting in like in a seminar room or think tank or whatever.

And some Chinese expert would say, we Chinese, we understand America much better than you Americans understand China, right?

And for years and years, I basically thought this was BS, that most people in China don't travel.

They have no idea, right?

And even the expert class