Its like Hillary walking into a working class kitchen for the first time.
They've been shielded from even critical support of China and other AES for so long they literally, not figuratively, literally cannot process that people exist that have beliefs that aren't Reddit Approved. They immediately assume it's bots or wumao. Human beings can't possibly hold these beliefs, so they must be Oriental hordes or actual robots.
my grandma, a woman who I ordinarily respect, who literally marched in civil rights protests, and had rocks thrown at her by klansmen, who was gay and in interracial relationships back when it could get you physically assaulted in public, once had the ignorant audacity to say in front of me "those people literally think Kim Jong Il
is a god." I simply laughed and said "Grandma, these are the same people who told you Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Come on, now."