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.
The 7% statistic seems credible to me at a glance, though somewhat dated. The data are from Peking University's 2010 China Family Panel Study, not RFA or Zenz pulling numbers out of their ass
https://docs.iza.org/dp9976.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Family_Panel_Studies
I’ll wager this statistic is declining over time, but I don’t know. I’m about to go to bed or I would do a deeper literature search.
For me the more important question is: Why? Why is China like this? Why did China liberalize under Deng? What is the worldwide political and economic context? Is child labor in China possibly a difficult problem to address, when we look at the whole situation? What measures have been taken so far? I hope you are at least wondering.
I’m no expert, but I’ll point out two things:
1 ) Not long ago, China was still dirt poor and fighting tooth and nail to industrialize and modernize as fast as possible. China’s economic power today is a fairly recent development.
2 ) China liberalized in order to survive in a hostile global economy. Liberalizing brought in a huge influx of foreign investment and industry expertise. The alternative was to be politically and economically strangled like most other socialist states have been. There’s only so much you can do with a self-contained economy in a hostile world.