Miss. Chen's comment reminded me of some rather unpleasant research experiences from my past。 I used to think India was terrible. But after diving deeper into my research, I realized I was wrong—because I discovered India was far worse than I had ever anticipated. Time and again, I caught myself wondering whether what was documented in books and broadcast on the news could possibly be true. How could such dreadful things exist—things that were deeply repulsive to me both psychologically and physically? For a period, I was researching India's fiscal expenditure, which gradually led me into a deeper study of the Public Distribution System (PDS). I learned that even after gaining independence, famines remained a frequent occurrence in India. Widespread famines in the 1950s forced Jawaharlal Nehru to plead for American aid. From 1965 to 1967, Bihar suffered the most catastrophic famine in post-independence Indian history. Astonishingly, even as late as 2000, Bihar was hit by disaster and plunged into famine once more. I found it almost impossible to fathom such a calamity occurring in the twenty-first century. In ancient China, during a devastating famine where the starving populace was forced to eat tree bark and leaves, the emperor famously asked upon hearing the news: 'Why don't they drink meat broth?' I eventually came to realize that I was acting much like that oblivious emperor. A lifetime of comfortable living in China had led me to take a full stomach for granted as a self-evident birthright. Yet the stark reality is that in India, basic food security does not seem to be self-evident at all. At the same time, domestic violence in India has erupted endlessly. There was the Telangana Armed Rebellion around the time of independence, marked by brutal slaughter between peasants and landlords; the Naxalbari armed uprising of 1967; the persistent turmoil across Northeast India; and the chaotic unrest surrounding linguistically re-organized states. In the 1970s, violence swept Bihar and Jharkhand, where lower-caste populations faced massacres and were driven to take up arms in self-defense. In the 1980s, brutal conflict engulfed Punjab—and it is little wonder that Satwant Singh and Beant Singh assassinated Indira Gandhi, given that their homeland had been ravaged on her orders. After learning the backstory of those two men, I even felt a surge of sympathy for them. In the 1990s, Kashmir plunged into upheaval, accompanied by indiscriminate violence against Muslims by Indian military, police, and Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF)—a pattern that persists to this day. Here I must recall a specific reading experience of mine. Following a terrorist attack in Kashmir in 2016, I set out to understand what was truly transpiring in the region and why young people harbored such intense hatred toward the Indian government. I gathered and read numerous relevant books, only to be utterly horrified by what I uncovered. Account after account in memoirs written by eyewitnesses revealed that most people were not taking up arms out of some abstract quest for independence, but simply because they could no longer endure the monstrous atrocities committed by the Indian government, military, and police. During the 1990s, Indian security forces in Kashmir operated with total impunity, opening fire at will. If a passerby accidentally cast a glance toward soldiers or police officers, he could be summarily detained and extrajudicially executed. One recorded incident involved a neutral government employee who recounted being arbitrarily rounded up alongside complete strangers for no apparent reason. They were marched down to a riverbank and mowed down with machine-gun fire; he survived solely because he happened to be standing behind several others who absorbed the bullets. Another incident remains seared in my memory. A teenage boy had attacked Indian military personnel, resulting in several casualties. That evening, several soldiers went to his home. In front of his father and younger brother, they gang-raped his mother and sister before murdering his father and brother. It was later reported that the perpetrators were comrades and fellow villagers of the slain soldiers who had carried out an extrajudicial reprisal. The matter was subsequently swept under the rug. Oh, and there is another frequently documented incident where a wedding procession was intercepted by security forces; the groom was brutally beaten, and the bride was gang-raped. That incident, too, vanished without accountability. Such horrors were tragically commonplace across Kashmir. At the time, I gasped in horror: how could such an appalling state exist in this world? I initially suspected the authors had fabricated these accounts to persuade me of the Indian government's depravity. Yet the details were so overwhelmingly authentic that I could not doubt their veracity. When another major attack occurred in February 2019, the underlying trigger followed the exact same pattern: the attacker had been subjected to humiliating abuse by police and CAPF personnel, confirming for me that these abuses were indeed a grim reality on the ground. Later, when armed attacks broke out in Manipur, I tried to investigate further. I uncovered a pervasive pattern of sexual violence against local women, including a infamous gang-rape case from 2004. In that incident, a local woman was raped and murdered by members of the Assam Rifles. Demanding justice, several Manipuri mothers stripped completely naked outside the Assam Rifles headquarters, holding a banner that read 'Rape Us,' and shouted in anguish: 'Don't rape our daughters, rape us!' That event shook me to my very core and left me deeply disturbed for a long time. I could only wonder what unimaginable humiliation the locals must have endured to be driven to such a desperate act. I ultimately abandoned that line of research altogether; the harrowing details from Kashmir had inflicted such severe emotional trauma that I had no desire to relive those feelings. Indian commentators frequently parrot Western media narratives criticizing China's policies in Xinjiang, accusing China of human rights violations and claiming the CCP imprisons Uyghurs in concentration camps. The truth, however, is that many Uyghurs suffered from severe poverty caused by geographic isolation, a lack of Mandarin proficiency, and a reliance on state welfare subsidies. To help them lift themselves out of poverty, the CCP government encouraged them to learn vocational skills and participate in modern economic life. Yet Western media vilified these educational and vocational training centers as 'concentration camps' and 'forced labor camps.' Furthermore, information isolation left many lacking a basic understanding of the law. A friend working in Xinjiang recounted a baffling incident: a local Uyghur received a text message from a terrorist claiming that killing a Han person would earn him a cash reward from the local CCP township government—and the man actually carried it out. I thought to myself: even if there were a bounty, it would be paid by the terrorists, not the government; how could anyone be so tragically gullible? Yet that is precisely what happened. Setting geopolitical narratives aside and looking at this from a parental perspective: if the CCP made any mistake, it was forcing people to acquire practical skills to escape poverty, and compelling them to understand that harming others is wrong, illegal, and leads to prison. It reminds me of my own mother: if I played outside and forgot to do my homework, she would slap me without hesitation; if I beat someone up without cause, she would strike me with a broomstick without leniency. Looking back, I can only say that my mother did the absolute right thing. Even setting all that aside and assuming for the sake of argument that those fake news reports and rumors were true, I have never once heard any media outlet accuse the PLA of indiscriminately shooting Uyghurs or carrying out extrajudicial executions; nor have I ever heard of PLA personnel committing rape or sexual assault against women in Xinjiang. Yet a segment of Indians routinely positions itself on a moral high ground to lecture China on how terrible its human rights record supposedly is. By now, I have developed a kind of mental immune system against news coming out of India, allowing me to process mind-boggling headlines with total detachment. For instance, I have long become desensitized to the rampant violence and corruption among Indian police and government officials. Such occurrences are far too numerous to enumerate. A Chinese video blogger once shared anecdotes he heard while traveling in India—how landlords would trick lower-caste laborers into signing indentured servitude contracts, chopping off their hands if their work was deemed unsatisfactory, or how high-caste individuals, upon falling ill, would suspect a lower-caste neighbor of casting 'black magic' and murder them as a result. Some viewers asked me if these stories were true. I replied that while I couldn't verify every detail, they were almost certainly true, because I had come across documentations of things far worse. Another reason I dislike engaging with former Indian officials is that they belong to a privileged elite in India that routinely oppresses others. Police officers and bureaucrats in India function virtually like feudal lords: they can arbitrarily detain, humiliate, beat citizens, destroy private property, scapegoat migrant workers from other states, and extort bribes with total impunity. Just a few days ago, CJP leader Abhijit Dipke and YouTube commentator Dhruv Rathee were detained—simply because these supposedly neutral bureaucrats and police officers brazenly align themselves with politicians and criminal syndicates to rule the country. While I have encountered documented cases of honest officials, they remain a distinct minority in such an environment. Subconsciously, therefore, I have always harbored a deeply unfavorable impression of Indian officialdom. So whenever former Indian officials or senior researchers adopt a condescending posture, dismissing young Chinese commentators as CCP-controlled AI translate robots, I am invariably reminded of those arrogant, privileged elites and the abysmal atrocities they quietly commit behind closed doors.

There are several fundamental flaws in the Indian way of thinking, chief among them being an excessive tendency to exaggerate oneself. The underlying objective is to extract greater benefits during competition and cooperation with others. While this logic may seem second nature to Indians, it often proves fatal in contemporary international competition. I previously answered a similar question on Zhihu—often dubbed China's Quora—titled: 'Why is it so difficult for India to practice bide-your-time (*tao guang yang hui*) like China?' zhihu.com/question/191096157… If you do not read Chinese, you can try using a translation tool or browser extension. In that answer, I laid out my perspective: First, compared to China, the governance capacity of the Indian central government has been relatively weak over the past several millennia. Finding it difficult to manage local affairs directly, Delhi has had to rely heavily on local forces and factions. Consequently, Indians tend to exhibit a much higher degree of loyalty to communal identities—such as caste, ethnicity, religion, and language—while national and civic consciousness remains comparatively weak. Second, Indian society is anchored by a deeply entrenched caste system, subdivided into Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, and Dalits, with countless sub-castes nested within them. Crucially, these sub-castes do not exist on equal footing. In India, you are either perched high above or serving others in subservience. Subservience and servitude equate to being ruled, placing one at a distinct disadvantage in the distribution of social rights and wealth. You cannot simply assume that because you are a farm owner and I am a farm owner, our social statuses are equal; nor can you assume parity simply because you are a Rajput and I am a Thakur. People are constantly engaged in an ongoing, real-time assessment and contest of relative strength. Third, the distribution of resources within India is profoundly unequal, with the resource gap between high-power and low-power groups far exceeding that of most other nations. Furthermore, India functions as one of the world's few de facto apartheid-like societies, where lower castes and ordinary citizens find it exceedingly difficult to secure upward mobility through their own resource accumulation. Under such fierce communal competition and extreme resource disparity, individuals naturally place their primary loyalty in their own community. Only by uniting with members of one's own group can one effectively compete against others. Securing power for the community translates directly to securing benefits for oneself. This perhaps explains why Indians show greater allegiance to their religion, caste, language, or political faction than to the nation-state. It also explains why Indians possess such an intense sense of collective honor, often reacting with profound indignation and ferocious counterattacks whenever they perceive insults to their group dignity. In this broad environment, Indians have devised some very clever tactical approaches to competition. For instance, how does one leverage minimal resources to confront a powerful adversary? A classic method is bluffing and hyperbole. If an Indian's actual strength is rated at 1, they will project it as broadly as possible, exaggerating it to 50 or even 100. In a sense, this is a form of 'financial leveraging'—using negligible strength to vie with a far more formidable opponent. It is much like blowing up a balloon. Yet almost all countries outside South Asia lack this particular mindset; they view power dynamics in a far more direct and rational light. To them, 1 is 1, and 100 is 100. In international competition, when other nations realize an adversary is stronger than them, they make a rational tactical retreat to cut their losses. The Indian approach, however, is precisely the opposite: the premise of leveraging or punching above one's weight is that the bluff must never be called. Just as Nehru pursued his aggressive 'Forward Policy' against China prior to 1962, leaving Chinese decision-makers utterly baffled: It was obvious that India lacked the comprehensive national power to confront China; why, then, would India provoke a vastly superior adversary? Did Chinese strategists miscalculate India's national strength? Or was India somehow far stronger than China? After three years of careful observation, a prudent China concluded that Nehru was simply acting beyond his capacity and behaving foolishly. Predictably, Nehru's inflated balloon was easily punctured by the Chinese. Therefore, India's greatest current cognitive trap is applying domestic domestic-game logic to international geopolitics, where the international community is hypersensitive and lightning-fast in evaluating real power. Once an opponent genuinely decides to engage in serious strategic competition, the balloon India has blown up will burst instantly. This is not merely my personal viewpoint; many observers from other countries view Indians in precisely this light. I dare say that well over half of the negative impressions of Indians on international social media stem from India's tendency toward boasting, arrogance, conceit, and overestimating its own capabilities. India's domestic poverty, filth, and lack of sanitation are secondary factors, as many developing nations grapple with poverty, backwardness, and poor hygiene—India is hardly unique in that regard. What *is* exceptional is how Indians invent all sorts of justifications for these shortcomings, attempting to use rhetoric to prove that the reality witnessed by international observers is somehow false. This is especially true regarding Chinese observers. When Chinese critics point out these systemic problems, an Indian's immediate reflex is to retort that the Chinese have been brainwashed by the CCP, that outsiders do not understand India's 'unique way of life,' or even to dig up archival photographs of China from the 1990s to 2000s and pass them off as present-day China. They attempt to show audiences that China is no better than India, implying that the Chinese have no moral standing to critique India. Given that the Chinese possess some of the highest cognitive benchmarks in the world, to them, such attempts feel like an insult to their intelligence. Consequently, I often joke to my friends that Indians live entirely within a world of their own making. In that universe, the sun revolves around the earth, the earth revolves around India, and India revolves around the Brahmins. With 200% sincerity, I must offer India this advice: Indians truly need to engage in genuine self-reflection rather than reflexively blaming external actors every time something goes wrong.