This is just absurdly wrong, and if you participated in American political culture you would know that.
"Cancel culture", a big deal in American politics, refers to how much liberal Americans love using political correctness to get their ideological enemies fired, banned, deplatformed, and pariahed. It is widespread across the American left and eagerly embraced by the young.
If you want to learn more about this, look up what happened to Bari Weiss and the controversy that produced.
Or just hop in Matt Taibi's Twitter replies.
But if people in China genuinely think this is how it works here in America, then that is pretty bad. Because it shows that neither side has any understanding of each other.
Which may explain Beijing inability to anticipate Trump.
AS a secondary point, liberal Americans don't like "liberal values" because of their genuine benefits. They like them because they denote the "superior" of the American state, irrespective of whether America actually practices those values. They are self congratulatory, which is needed at a time when American elites can do nothing but self congratulate.
AS a consequence, they really don't care if this or that proves America is hypocrite. To Americans, American greatness is taken as a given, and possession of "free speech", "Democracy" or other liberal values is used to retroactively justify that.
You have your causality backwards, which is why this "wait until Americans wake up strategy" has produced such dismal results.
This has nothing to do with cancel culture.
I still remember what happened after 9/11. The entire western sphere rallied around the US to support its invasion of Afghanistan, even though the was zero evidence of al-Qaeda involvement being presented.
I also remember the invasion of Iraq. The American public once again rallied around a bottle of detergent, but many western countries refused to follow suit this time. France and Canada among the most prominent.
Fast forward to Libya and Syria. With the Iraq debacle still ongoing, the American public was much less supportive of military operations in those two areas. In Libya, Obama let France take the lead, and in Syria, after numerous lines in the sand, the US was only willing to give covert support to the rebels. Opposition to actual invasion of those countries was very strong among the public.
This timeline clearly shows the degradation of public trust in the US on matters of foreign policy. Even discarding the tragedy of 9/11, the US had unconditional support among its allies in the bombing of Yugoslavia. Lies have a price, and even with the US still holding military supremacy, trust matters.
We are seeing the same thing today. The American public is bombarded with anti-China lies, and those lies have done real damage especially in HK and among Chinese Americans. If Trump goes ahead an bans Tiktok, it will have shattered one of its most repeated lies against China. Some people might find ways to rationalize the ban, but most will feel extremely uncomfortable at the cognitive dissonance. Some will be driven to seek out the truth behind the lies, while others will be more skeptical when presented with the next campaign of lies.
It takes time for people to lose their trust, but once lost, it is a lot more difficult to regain that trust.
