It goes without saying that there is a great deal of mutual incomprehension between China and the West. Chief among them, I would argue, is how they think mainland Chinese and ethnic Chinese in the diaspora perceive the country. Most Westerners underestimate the high levels of support the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government at all levels of society enjoy. Many foreigners who have never visited China likely have no conception of it. On the other hand, Beijing constantly overestimates the “loyalty”, nationalism or patriotism of ethnic Chinese overseas. From my own experience, many who were originally from places other than mainland China share the mainstream values and political leanings of the Western societies they call home, and may well be unsympathetic or even antagonistic to Beijing. This has been especially pronounced after the violent anti-government and anti-China protests in Hong Kong last year. Such mutual misunderstanding is often amplified by senior officials, who ought to know better. Translated into policy, it naturally leads to greater mutual antagonism between China and the West, especially the United States. Those of us who know something about China may find it absurd that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has tried to call on Chinese citizens to join his international effort to “change the behaviour” of their government. Attempting to drive a wedge between the ruling Communist Party and the country’s “1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out”, his call will appeal to American voters, but likely will have the opposite effect on mainland Chinese. “By emitting hostility toward China, we are driving the Chinese people into the arms of the Communist Party,” Stapleton Roy of the Kissinger Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, told The Atlantic magazine. Opinion: Both Western democracy and the Chinese model are flawed As another former US diplomat, Robert Daly, puts it, “the available evidence is that, as citizens of the PRC, most Chinese people feel proud and enabled, not constrained [by their government].” Evidence includes a new long-term Harvard study of more 31,000 mainlanders from 2003 to 2016 who showed a swell of support for the central government. But misunderstanding and hostility cut both ways. China’s consul general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, has just accused critics of sowing discord within the Chinese-Canadian community. She accused them of being part of “anti-China forces” and trying to cause “trouble”. Beijing shouldn’t assume a high level of support from ethnic Chinese overseas.