"We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings and consequently, some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves"
About this Quote
The sting in Jung Chang's line is how calmly it maps a chain reaction of dehumanization: start at home, end in the world. She isn’t describing a single act of cruelty so much as a political technology. When a state treats its citizens as units to be managed rather than people to be protected, it does more than wound private lives; it teaches everyone watching what to believe those lives are worth. The "consequently" is doing heavy lifting. It frames prejudice from "outsiders" not as an isolated moral failure but as an export product, downstream from official behavior.
Chang’s phrasing is deliberately plain, almost bureaucratic, mirroring the cold logic she’s indicting. "Proper human beings" sounds like paperwork language, as if humanity were a credential the state can grant or revoke. That’s the subtext: authoritarianism doesn’t only punish; it rewrites the categories by which empathy is distributed. Once a government normalizes surveillance, denunciation, and disposability, it creates an atmosphere where the citizen becomes suspect by default. Outsiders then meet that person through the state's shadow - propaganda, diplomatic posture, refugee narratives, even the faint stigma attached to a "regime."
Context matters: Chang’s work is steeped in the lived afterlife of Maoist China, where ideological campaigns trained people to see neighbors as targets and families as liabilities. Her sentence reads like a warning for any era: when a government models contempt for its own people, it hands strangers permission to do the same, then acts surprised when the world follows the script.
Chang’s phrasing is deliberately plain, almost bureaucratic, mirroring the cold logic she’s indicting. "Proper human beings" sounds like paperwork language, as if humanity were a credential the state can grant or revoke. That’s the subtext: authoritarianism doesn’t only punish; it rewrites the categories by which empathy is distributed. Once a government normalizes surveillance, denunciation, and disposability, it creates an atmosphere where the citizen becomes suspect by default. Outsiders then meet that person through the state's shadow - propaganda, diplomatic posture, refugee narratives, even the faint stigma attached to a "regime."
Context matters: Chang’s work is steeped in the lived afterlife of Maoist China, where ideological campaigns trained people to see neighbors as targets and families as liabilities. Her sentence reads like a warning for any era: when a government models contempt for its own people, it hands strangers permission to do the same, then acts surprised when the world follows the script.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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