I am freakishly angry at my parents right now. Everything they say or do makes me irritated—the nagging is incessant, and they nitpick on very single little thing. For example, today my mom accused me of not caring about the earthquake victims in Sichuan, my hometown city. Their idea of caring is to donate money and to watch with almost a masochistic attitude at the state-run television report of victims. I for one am horrified by the whole propaganda campaign the regime in China has mounted in the face of this tragedy. I am frustrated and angry at the fact that no one seems to notice the people who bring up the point that the government should have done more to fix the structural damage before something bad like this was going to happen in the first place! My parents say, Look at Katrina, and I tell them that I don’t think Katrina was handled properly, but that doesn’t make China’s government any better. But my mom thinks I don’t care, even though I tried to tell her that during finals week I had to repress all of my sad feelings just so I could get through exams.

I don’t understand their hypocrisy—they say politics is stupid whenever I watch coverage of the elections on CNN, yet they urge me over and over again to watch the propagandistic reporting on CCTV. The pictures of officers dressed up in full uniforms publicly depositing their donations into a box on stage on national television disgusts me. Why the excess? Why all the brouhaha when we could be focusing more on rescue efforts? I don’t understand why they show the images of orphans laying on the ground crying for their parents. Don’t they want these kids to return to a normal life?! It seems like the Chinese government is trying to indoctrinate these kids with an inerasable sense of tragedy, one that can only be solved with the help of the dear government.

My parents tell me now is not the time to complain. But by the time the rescue efforts are over, a large majority (dare I say, almost everyone) will be so brainwashed with the government’s “praiseworthy” efforts to save their people that the post-rescue-efforts criticism will be dismal indeed. Does no one remember the flood of 1998? I remember. But even now China has not made any improvements. How can my parents possibly say with such blind devotion that the Chinese government is good?

Yes, I know relative to the military junta in Burma, things are going swimmingly well by comparison in China. But I really don’t think this kind of relativity is a good thing in this case: just because one authoritarian government is better than another doesn’t mean it can continue to co-opt its citizens this way. I’m all for coming together in times of national tragedy—I am all for unity, and for strength in numbers—what I am not for is creating robots who will solidify their loyalty to a state that has turned its own incompetence into a political party. This may sound really un-patriotic (from the Chinese point of view), but we Americans know better that a president standing in a disaster area doesn’t mean much. I believe in fundraisers—but I don’t think sitting there and crying is going to help anything in the long run. China needs change—it needs to have the younger generation care about the underlying problems of the government, to look beyond the veil of the state’s “heroism” in this earthquake and to agitate for real change. So this kind of thing isn’t going to happen again.

And my parents say I don’t care.