I am Chinese, and have lived in China and the U.S. for equal numbers of years and I agree that on the surface, these observations are true - the government controls a lot in China, and the people don't seem to know or care about a lot of the corruption in today's China. However, after talking to numerous Chinese students and workers this summer, I realized that the average citizen understands a lot more about it all than we do, than we think they do. Western media tend to portray Chinese citizens as unaware and fooled under an oppressive government. Honestly, to foreigners, Chinese citizens will always feel defensive about their country and express their pride in China first, which is very understandable that they want to show their love for their home to a visitor. The thing is, amongst themselves, however, there is a lot of very insightful complaints and debates over China's politics, economy, media, etc. I've lived in Renmin University (People's University) this summer, and have talked to students there. I went with the mentality of "oh, let me tell you what you DON'T know about our country because I've been living in the West, whose media is objective!" and I was immediately humbled after a few discussions. After opening up, the students express a lot of dissatisfaction about China's education system, government, media country, etc. and they KNOW about how Western media portrays them, they KNOW that the West always loves to use Tiananmen as an example. What I found was that among students, they exchange many intelligent ideas about how China needs to improve. So what's the real problem? The observations listed in this article are mere observations. It's not like Chinese people don't know that the things listed here are happening, including government controlled media, the Tibetan protests, the special treatments to foreigners, the poorly constructed buildings, the people cutting corners, government being corrupt etc. etc. In this day and age, information is passed around pretty quickly, even when censored by the government. Of course the people know, they live and work their whole lives there! So, no, China needs no more such superficial criticisms; the Chinese people are not ignorant, they know more than we'll ever do about China itself. So we don't need to say "China needs to change into what we think is a better country", we really just need to say "we believe that the people of China are able to deal with their problems themselves", even though the current Chinese government may not believe in its own people.