Andrew I live on the other side of the world, and I have never been to China, so there are plenty of things I can be wrong about with regards to China.

But I have a few simple rules I follow then reflecting upon truth and falsehood:

Nobody including me can ever know anything with 100% certainty.

Does that mean anything is equally true? No, I believe we can operate with probabilities.

E.g. I have never met Donald Trump, so I cannot know if he exists. However I see countless videos and articles about him. I can ask myself what is more plausible:

1. All these articles and videos exist, because Donald Trump is a real person.

2. They exist because somebody fabricated evidence of his existence.

Both cases are possible but number 1 is more plausible. That is Baysian logic. I try to apply that to everything.

So when I judge what is going on in China, I choose to believe something based on probability. I choose to believe that based on the number of collaborating stories and eyewitnesses.

Now it is possible they are all lying to smear China. It is possible that some of them lie. But all of them in a consistent manner... that seem implausible.

When Chinese media, and various citizens and CCP say it is all lies. What am I to believe? How do I know if they tell the truth? Maybe they are right?

I have to consider motivations. Is the CCP motivated to to tell the truth? Would the CCP admit that e.g. they run internment camps? No, that seems implausible.

What about people who are not part of the CCP? I trust them more than party officials, but then I make distinction between people who grew up under CCP rule and say people who moved to China from elsewhere. It seems plausible to me that people who grew up in the CCP system will be biased towards their view.

I cannot trust that people raised in the CCP controlled China have neutral views on China. Because China does not have press freedom. Education is tightly controlled. E.g. the Tiannaman square massacre is strictly censored.

And we have knowledge about how people develop views in numerous other dictatorships whether that was the USSR, Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. We know people there did not have balanced views of their motherland. Thus why should I believe somebody growing up in mainland China has a balanced view of China?

I know accounts from people who have been teaching in China. The educatonal system seems focused on characterizing a lot of countries as enemies of China. Peter Hessler e.g. taught many years in China and remarked on how Chinese children all seemed quick to be able to list the "enemies of China," yet the same child did not know a single friend of China.

It leaves me with the impression that Chinese society nurtures a belief in China being surrounded by ememies. That whatever is said and done by foreigners must be distrusted.

Do I know this is reality? No of course not. This just my opinion shaped by what read. But it seems plausbile because creating enemies is an old trick used by all dictatorships through history.

Do you think I am being unreasonble? If so, how do you suggest I seek the most plausible truth? Or for that matter how do you Andrew decide what to believe in?