Politics & Power Quote by Alex Chiu

National identity gets deployed here less like a passport and more like a shield. Alex Chiu’s line performs a neat rhetorical dodge: by declaring he “doesn’t care” which political party runs China, he sidesteps the most combustible question in Chinese public life - legitimacy - and replaces it with a warmer, supposedly unarguable claim of shared belonging. It’s the classic move of a businessman who wants unity to function as a solvent: dissolve politics, keep the market, the culture, the “we.”

The intent reads as de-escalation and alignment at once. “Right now” is doing extra work, shrinking regime control into a temporary detail, while “all I know” frames the statement as common sense rather than a choice. That posture matters: it asks the listener to treat ideology as noise and ethnicity or nationality as signal. The subtext is a bid for safety and access. In contexts where taking a side can cost contracts, visas, or credibility, refusing to name the party is not neutrality; it’s risk management with a patriotic finish.

“We are all Chinese” is also deliberately elastic. For some, it’s diaspora reassurance: you can live abroad and still belong. For others, it can read like pressure - a soft demand that cultural identity outrank political disagreement, even when the disagreement is about rights, sovereignty, or history. The line’s power is in how it flatters the audience into consensus, offering unity as virtue while quietly setting the terms: to be “Chinese,” in this framing, is to treat politics as secondary. That’s comforting, and it’s also a way of narrowing what counts as acceptable speech.