can any of you really unironically say you paid much attention in like civics class or whatever?

Ah, but just because most Americans don't pay attention to civics class doesn't mean it didn't work its magic by sowing its seeds. Most Americans wouldn't be able to tell you what each article of the constitution is for, but they 100% internalize American exceptionalism, part of which is taught in their civics class. That's where the "we are the world's oldest democracy," "the founding fathers are gods among men," "the war for independence was fought because of taxes," and other lies come from.

At least for Vietnam, Luna Oi initially thought the Marxism classes she took during college were completely boring and she largely blew them off, even to the point of briefly identifying as a liberal instead. But it was when she started dealing with the online Western left that she had a lot of "Jesus Christ, this shit is so obvious, how do you not understand basic shit" moments. And she has come full circle, going from thinking those Marxist classes were boring as fuck to dedicating thousands of hours to translating one of those boring books from Vietnamese into English. This makes me think that either those boring Marxism classes were a lot more effective than she thought in molding her thoughts or Vietnamese society is completely oriented towards socialist values so that even someone who consciously rejects socialism would still subconsciously internalize socialist values.

It would be interesting to see to what extend Chinese civics class sown seeds in Chinese students' head.

can any of you really unironically say you paid much attention in like civics class or whatever?

Yes? And while civics or government classes are one thing, even people who didn't pay attention and can't name their senators or whatever tend to parrot the basic talking points of what could be considered liberal theory since they've been indoctrinated through all forms of media and institutions from birth.

I wonder if that is singificantly different based on geographical location. I’d expect the party to be closer to working class in the rural and poorer provinces where officials are required to listen more closely to the requests and necessities of the people than say the big T1-2 cities. I don’t think the modern city life in China is too different than in the west at least when it comes to political engagement.

Besides class, it's heavily dependent on province as well and even regions within a province, especially for provinces like Guangdong. Besides Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet being different from "proper" China, there's also a north/south divide within "proper" China. My impression is that south China is more "capitalisty" than north China, for lack of a better term. This has roots in history. Paper currency was first introduced in Sichuan, and there's speculation that had the Mongol conquest of Southern Song not taken place, capitalism would've been first developed in Southern Song (or another successive Chinese dynasty that incorporated southern provinces) instead of Europe. The treaty ports (Shanghai, Guangzhou, Ningbo, Fuzhou, Xiamen) were all located in the south as well.

More recent history also points to this trend. Mao was exacerbated that the southern provinces Fujian, Guangdong, and Guangxi wasn't conducting land reform fast enough, and he purged most of the cadre from Guangdong because they didn't want to fully liquidate the landlords and conduct land reform even after being warned. There's a reason why Deng had a southern tour in order to garner support for reforms and opening-up and not a northern tour. Today, the most liberal part of "proper" China is Shanghai, a southern city. And of course, Taiwan and Hong Kong are very much part of southern China in terms of culture.

And as a final point, the Chinese diaspora has traditionally been from southern China as well, principally Fujian and Guangdong. Chinese American food like fried rice and wonton soup is basically bastardized Cantonese (Guangdong) food. I think this has ramifications as well in being a source of anti-communism from outside to China since the Chinese diaspora still maintains familial ties with the Mainland. And I'm not just talking about Chinese Americans or Chinese Anglo settler-colonials. Your average Chinese diaspora from Singapore or Malaysia is super anti-communist as well. DPA is super biased against China to the point of being a completely useless source of information on par with some China watcher sexpat, which isn't that surprising since he's Chinese Singaporean.