> Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.

I don't recall historical instances where that was a major problem. The closest analogue would be the cold war, where US propaganda successfully got the USSR to switch to democracy (a move that, ultimately, was to the benefit of the people). The Soviet counter-propaganda was ultimately unconvincing and everyone agrees that Communism was a disaster - even the people who lived in communist communities as children.

It is too hard to come up with a 20- or 30-year propaganda campaign that has meaningful impacts, the results are fundamentally unclear because everyone will have different policies in 30 years. If anyone knew how to reliably change societies through propaganda we'd already be using that technique in the west to align everyone to capitalism instead of having the constant socialist regressions that keep cropping up.

Propaganda is effective for specific political decisions in the short term when targeted at adults. Over the longer term it has impacts that are hard to foresee and impossible to control, for good or ill.

> It has nothing to do with whether Chinese propaganda is worse than US propaganda.

It sounds important when you phrase it like that. Why listen to worse propaganda?

> > Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.

> I don't recall historical instances where that was a major problem.

This is truly laughable.

We would have never let the German government own ABC in the 1930s, for obvious reasons. And the Chinese government would never let a US company own any of their influential media networks.

I always feel like this argument has a "doth protest too much" feel to it.