Yesterday we had dinner at another couple's house and we started talking about China. Their government makes the US look great; I'm so glad to be born here. Everyone who disagrees is out of there, so you have a country of homogenous thinkers. It's impacting their ability to do research, and at research universities, they pick up on facts quickly and do very well on exams (much more so than Americans). But they have been taught to not explore what is semi-known, or ask critical questions, or question the dogma, and they are much much worse at research as a result. Someone they knew was in China for awhile and left because the fact that no one questioned the government (even privately, in their heads) and just assumed it was a benevolent father figure, and that there was no propaganda. There are so many people there--1 out of 5? I know very little about it. But the whole thing is awful, that so many people live stuck in that state of thought. Any idiot in the US will still question things a little bit; since we have the two-party system (really the same but looks different), people are used to questioning the other side's thoughts, even if it's very shallow criticism and they can't see the same thing going on in their own thinking. China can't innovate for that reason, but they can copy technology from other countries quickly enough.