I had a group of friends that I spent most my sophomore year with at a very liberal east-coast college. Most of the friends in the group studied international relations and we frequently discussed politics. As I got to know them, I realized that we differed on a lot of things. Two of them told me that they wanted to join the CIA as analysts. Now I'm not a poli-sci major, but I know enough about history to know that the CIA has done and continues to do some evil shit. Now I do have a bunch of moderate leaning friends, but it felt different talking with this group of friends they had good understand of history and political philosophy. One of these guys, let’s call him Matt, was a huge Aaron Sorkin fan and Blairite (weirdly obsessed with British politics for some reason). Matt also wanted to work in political finance. I thought we were bonding over are mutual interest in the space related stuff until he showed me a Aaron Sorkin mini-series on the Apollo Space Program. And then proceed to tell me that he like the Apollo Missions because of all the political wonkery involved. The tipping point in our friendship was when he told me, at a BLM protest, that he was happy to finally get his "liberal street cred". Liberal wonks are some of the worst people to be friends with if you genuine care about making life better for people.
My girlfriend at the time was a huge Joe Biden supporter, her mom worked at the World Bank. She would often jokingly say that I was a communist and would side with the group of friends on domestic and foreign policy issues. She started fighting with me when I explained to her that the public health think-tank that she was applying to was just a health care lobbying group. This hurt me because I was really in love with her at the time, but I could see that she wasn’t open to critically challenge the world around her. She also got upset that I owned a gun, as many people from the south do. And when I decided to switch my studies from finance to computers science, she wasn’t supportive. Anyway, I broke up with her later and stopped talking with group of friends.
Anyway, I really wish I could meet some cool people with socialist outlook that are down to crack a cold one and do some grilling.
I've found it helps not to talk about China directly. If folks don't have a basic understanding of how much the US has fucked with every other country on Earth over the last century, it's hard for someone to make the leap that all the propaganda the US puts out about China is wrong. I often start with the Contras, because the US' involvement with them is just so abhorrent and shocking you really can't come to any conclusion other than Reagan was a very bad person, which is shocking to most Americans. And 99% of Americans have no clue why we got involved in Vietnam. They might spout the "to fight communism" line but you can just show folks how it was never really about that. I've worked on people that way. Once people understand America's foreign policy not in term of us trying to make the world a better place for freedom and democracy, but rather the exertion of power in order to preserve hegemony, THEN a proper view on China starts to make sense.