Had a fascinating conversation on the train from Newcastle to Edinburgh today with a Chinese mother and her 12-years old kid (mostly with the mother) on her parenting philosophy and political beliefs.

It was quite an empty train carriage as we were not in peak hours, but the views outside the window of the North Sea were gorgeous that time of day. The mother was murmuring to her child that “it would be good if we asked someone to take a picture for us” in Chinese, which I overheard — then I offered to help them take the photos.

So then naturally we began having a conversation. She asked what I was doing in the UK, I told her that I’m on an exchange program in Oxford from my American university. She said, “wow, good for you!” I asked her what they were doing here: and she replied that it was a trip her 12-years old son had organized for the two of them - from flights to visas and hotels, from Tianjin to Abu Dhabi, London, Oxbridge and York - all were done by the 12-years old boy with the assistance of Doubao, the Chinese AI chatbot by ByteDance. (Just like how the generation before me looks at a 14-years old with access to Google Scholar in wonders, we will look at 14-years old with access to chatbots in wonders too.)

I was very impressed, and said that it is great she’s allowing her child to develop these abilities independently from such a young age. We proceeded to talk about her educational philosophy (well, more her talking to me and me smiling and nodding).

It was when the conversation got to Chinese language and culture education that things became more interesting. She went on a half-conspiratorial, but 100%-genuine rant about how foreign powers like Japan and the U.S. are brainwashing the Chinese youth into hating Chinese culture (sound familiar?), and that this has caused general moral decay amongst young people nowadays, which can definitely be fixed if we mandate more ancient Chinese philosophy readings in schools; that kids ‘abandoning’ their parents in elder care homes is like when people betray their motherland; how Taiwan is and always will be part of China; how despicable the Americans are in invading other countries, and that China is the only peaceful great power — “if other countries could just be like China, the world will have peace forever.”

A separate but also very revealing point she made is that for government officials, “I can understand if they take bribes here and there; that’s how business is done. But you can’t sell out your country, like those who stab China in the back on behalf of Japan. If it were up to me, they’d all be executed immediately!”

I nodded along and smiled. After she finished, I said, “So I study politics in a U.S. university. They have their own narratives, and I think it is important to remember that 兼听则明 (listen to all perspectives and you find clarity) and that it is good to learn what everyone believes, without being so quick to judge. It’s always good to learn more and know more.” She was smart enough to realize that I was trying to save everyone an argument on the train, so we moved back to talking about her parental philosophy.

They are clearly not the representative sample of a Chinese family — they are from Tianjin, a developed urban center next to the country’s capital; the child, at 12-years-old, speaks English with conversational fluency despite going to a local primary school with little English language instruction; and they are on a 4-weeks summer holiday trip traversing the Middle East and the British Isles. But the point is that she can be quite liberal in parenting, letting her boy book a holiday with her credit card; very conservative and traditionalist about cultural politics; and acknowledge that going on trips abroad is important to expanding the child’s horizons.

In a way, she puts a face to the anonymous 小粉红 comment threads on social media. They are certainly not a monolith - very often they do not parrot state propaganda word-for-word, but they internalize the spirit of the message that often cannot be said out-loud. They find these political positions intuitive, natural, and utterly commonsensical. The fact that she was comfortable sharing these opinions with me, another Chinese person she just met on a Scottish train 20 minutes ago, reveals the fact that she does not understand just how controversial these statements can be.

Anyways, food for thought and a lesson in intellectual humility, I suppose. People are complex, and they act with complex motives — particularly when it comes to the things most closely relevant to oneself, in this case, raising one’s own child. The apparent contradiction between liberal parenting and conservative politics here is not really a contradiction in her mind because they operate on different levels of cognition, which without introspection have no need to resolve each other’s inconsistencies. I do wonder if someone else sat in my position today, and I was the passionate speaker of politics at some point in the past. It really is humbling.