The Chinese believe they enjoy just as much freedom as we do. They are informed by their international travel. Every year, over 100 million Chinese travel the world over. They've seen our freedoms in the US, UK, France, Germany, etc.
Given that only 120 million Chinese even have passports, 100 million traveling the world every year seems a bit optimistic.
Stats do show at least 120 million Chinese have travelled outside the country every year (except, of course, during the pandemic years). This is not speculation requiring optimism.
But if what you say is true, that means most Chinese with a passport are taking international trips every year. If we discount Hong Kong (which doesn't require a passport, and anyways, is part of China, though it does count as an international trip from the airport's perspective, and you have to go through emigration, you also didn't say if you were counting HK residents also, so I guess we could have a bunch of different numbers there), I don't see how that could be true given the dearth of people with passports who are even capable of taking trips abroad.
But perhaps you've never experienced poverty, so you may not know.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-02/hong-kong...
1.6 million out of 7.3 million people is definitely serious, but hardly a majority. I've been to the SAR a few times, and don't think it is especially poor, especially when compared to even China's richest city like Shanghai.
As for my own personal experiences, please don't make assumptions like that. You have no idea what I've been through in my life, and it is rather not relevant to this discussion.
When you add these to the people who are living in poverty, that doesn't leave for a lot of travelers.
That's up from 100 million in 2013, so the number was rapidly increasing before the pandemic (and it will probably begin rapidly increasing again).
Regardless, the point stands that at the moment, there's no mass rush to escape China. Most people in China think life is getting better year for year, and are fairly optimistic about the future of the country. It's not a democracy, but it's not the dystopia it's caricatured as in Western media.
0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1068495/china-number-of-...
It's not liberal democracy. It's not democracy as defined in the West.
It's the Chinese model of democracy, or what is known as "whole-process people's democracy."
And it works for the Chinese. That's the big takeaway.
That's why the Chinese regard China as the most democratic nation in the world, according to Latana's Democracy Perception Index 2022.
That's what the author meant by Western arrogance. We in the West think we are entitled to define what is and isn't democracy. On what basis? Because we dominate the world politically?