"China" is not a monolith

When a Chinese company does something questionable, headlines blame “China.” When a Chinese tourist behaves badly, it reflects on “China.” When a Chinese student excels at university, whispers wonder if “China” sent them.

Somehow, 1.4 billion people became a singular noun with a singular intent.

I’ve lived in Shenzhen for years now, and I can confirm that the city contains at least six violently different opinions on where to get the best changfen (肠粉). The idea that everyone here could coordinate their views on anything—let alone geopolitics—is, how do I put this delicately, completely mental.

The substitution test

Try this experiment. Take any headline about “China” and substitute “United States.”

“United States infiltrates universities through student exchange programmes.” The framing sounds paranoid immediately. US students abroad are understood as just… students. Some brilliant, some mediocre, most trying to figure out laundry in a foreign language.

“US weaponises technology companies for global surveillance.” Post-Snowden, this claim has teeth—which is precisely the point. When the NSA was found to have collaborated with tech companies, the response distinguished between government overreach, corporate compliance, and what individual Americans believed. Nuance survived. The entire population wasn’t treated as suspects.

“US citizens abroad advance US interests.” This would get a laugh. American tourists are advancing their interests in finding decent coffee and complaining about portion sizes.

(Even “America” is lazy shorthand—ask a Canadian or Brazilian how they feel about one country claiming an entire hemisphere’s name. These patterns are easy to fall into without noticing.)

Yet when the subject is China, this basic understanding of how societies work evaporates. Every Chinese company becomes an arm of the state. Every Chinese citizen becomes a potential agent. Every success becomes evidence of some grand, coordinated scheme.

The actors that aren’t “China”

This framing welds together entirely separate things:

The Chinese government sets policy, regulates markets, and yes, sometimes does things that warrant criticism. Like any government.

Chinese companies are trying to make money. Some are state-owned or state-influenced, but the vast majority operate as private enterprises in competitive domestic markets. The ones listed on NASDAQ have shareholders in New York who care about returns, not ideology. They face antitrust investigations, regulatory fines, and market pressures—often from their own government.

Chinese people are 1.4 billion individuals with wildly different opinions, preferences, and priorities. My neighbour thinks the local government is too lax on traffic enforcement. His wife thinks they’re too strict. They’ve been married for twenty years and still can’t agree on this.

These are distinct actors with distinct motivations. To call them all “China” is to confuse the play for the playwright, the soldiers for the state, the voters for the vote. A useful corrective: think of China as Europe—a continent of distinct regions and interests, not a single actor.

Yes, some companies have state ties. Yes, there have been documented cases of espionage. These warrant scrutiny of specific actors through specific evidence. But painting 1.4 billion people with suspicions earned by a handful of cases isn’t caution—it’s prejudice dressed as prudence.

When these distinct actors get collapsed into “China,” the framing isn’t analytical. It’s lazy.

An old story in new clothes

This flattening has a history, and it’s not flattering. The “inscrutable Oriental” trope—the idea that Asian people lack individual agency, moving as a coordinated mass—is centuries old. It’s been used to justify exclusion acts, internment camps, and foreign policy disasters.

The modern version is subtler but structurally identical. Instead of explicit racial language, we get euphemisms: “China’s long game,” “the Chinese way of thinking,” “how China operates.” These phrases smuggle in the same assumption—that 1.4 billion people share one brain.

The assumption is no longer that “they all look alike,” but that “they all think alike”—a premise just as flawed and just as dangerous.

I grew up in Singapore’s British-influenced education system and absorbed these frames without noticing. The dominant English-language media I consumed granted Western societies nuance—regulators fighting corporations, citizens protesting governments, companies competing ruthlessly. Not all coverage was equal, of course. But the default assumption was complexity.

It wasn’t until I moved to Shenzhen that I noticed the double standard. The same complexity I’d been taught to see in Western societies? Apparently it stopped at the Chinese border.

The bias isn’t always conscious.

But unconscious bias is still bias.

What we lose

This matters beyond hurt feelings.

None of this denies the Chinese state’s significant influence. But mistaking influence for monolithic control causes us to misunderstand everything from market reforms to social change. The monolithic framing sees a chessboard with one player, when in reality it’s a dynamic ecosystem of competing and aligning interests.

When China is framed as a monolith, observers become worse at understanding how it actually works. They miss the genuine policy debates, the factional disagreements, the regulatory crackdowns on domestic tech giants that suggest the relationship between state and private enterprise is far more complicated than “big brother controls everything.”

The framing damages relationships before they start. Chinese students arrive at Western universities already suspected. Chinese businesses face regulatory scrutiny their Western competitors avoid. Chinese individuals abroad navigate a fog of assumption that their counterparts never encounter.

And it blinds. If every Chinese action is part of a grand authoritarian scheme, genuine concerns become indistinguishable from phantom threats. Real partners blur into real problems. The monolithic frame means shadowboxing a cartoon villain while the actual, complicated reality goes unexamined.

Seeing clearly

I’m not asking anyone to approve of Chinese government policy or ignore real issues. Criticism, where warranted, should be precise—aimed at specific policies, specific actors, specific decisions. That’s how accountability works.

And precise criticism actually gets results here. When specific policies face pushback—domestically or internationally—they often iterate rapidly. But that feedback loop requires identifying what’s actually happening, not what observers assume must be happening based on a cartoon of how “China” operates.

“China wants” is not precision. It’s a shortcut that flatters existing assumptions instead of challenging them.

So here’s a rule: never accept a sentence that claims “China wants.” Demand to know who in China wants it. The Politburo? A provincial governor? A tech CEO chasing market share? A generation of young consumers? Until you can answer that, you don’t understand the story.

Countries don’t want things. Governments do. Companies do. People do. And they often want completely different things—which is rather the point of having a society in the first place.