" All the soldiers cried, for they did not wish to eat [the woman]. Zhang Xun ordered them to eat the flesh. Afterwards, they caught the women in the city. When there were no more women left, they turned to the old and young men. 20,000 to 30,000 people were eaten. People always remained loyal."

Honestly to figure out why Chinese are the way they are all you need to look is at their Civil War history.

IIRC 6 out of the 10 deadliest wars in human history were Chinese Wars. 10 out of 10 if relative to the human population at the time.

When you have wars like this that resulted from a "weak government collapsing", then of course you'd rather endure an authoritarian but "stable" government over a "liberal but weak government". Because while for us "the government fell apart" invokes images of just constant and annoying re-elections, in China this invokes a mental image of basically fucking Hell itself opening it's Jaws to swallow the country whole.

It's why anti-democratic propaganda by the CCP is so effective: they never argue that democracy is bad, they simple argue that it's somewhat unstable. The historic implications to that statement do the rest.

So if you wanna convince the Chinese of liberal democracy, rather than arguing "freedom is just better", you need to argue "democracy is the most stable system of government there is".