Tyranny of opinion over China?

On Comment is Free yesterday Daniel A. Bell, a political philosopher based in Beijing, was pleading for a better press for China than it currently gets in the West. Some of the points he makes I will pass over in a sentence each. An overly critical attitude does no good, he argues, because it plays right into the hands of reactionary political forces inside China (on which see these two previous posts of mine). Bell also has the impression that the radical transformation China has been undergoing, affecting standards of living and personal freedoms there for the better, is not widely reported or known about - which is open to question, I think. And he affects a puzzlement over why the Beijing Olympics should be called the 'genocide' Olympics, even though he is well aware that, some disanalogies with Nazi Germany notwithstanding, it's China's being 'implicated in the killings in Darfur' that prompts that way of referring to them.

The point I want to concentrate on is that Bell enlists John Stuart Mill in the service of his case. Mill was as much concerned, he reminds us, with the tyranny of opinion as he was with the restrictions imposed on individuals by governments. Bell quotes from this passage of the introduction to On Liberty:

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

This strikes me as a serious misapplication of Mill's argument. It's not only that the idea of there being such a tyranny of opinion in Western countries regarding China is bizarre - as if any of us had to take care what our friends, colleagues or acquaintances might catch us out thinking on the subject, or risked exclusion and pariahdom for being too much influenced by the Guardian columns of Martin Jacques. It is that the above passage from Mill so little applies to pretty well any kind of political difference such as gets discussed on Comment is Free or elsewhere in the blogosphere or the press. Dissent, heterodoxy, strangeness, provocation for its own sake and out and out lunacy rub shoulders in these places with conventional opinion, run-of-the-mill certainties, balanced criticism, careful and illuminating discussion, and so forth. There may still be areas where the tyranny of opinion operates, but I don't think Daniel A. Bell has identified one of them.