

I think not understanding what they’re committing is more dangerous than before
This kind of reasoning applies to every new tool. 20 years ago I was saying the same thing about work from co-workers who started programming on Java and didn’t understand what their beloved HashMap actually does under the hood.
Eventually we adapt to either the new tools or to the new dangers, the ones who don’t just become fossils.








The situation in the US is a bit different though because the US has been doing this for over a hundred years and only turned around “recently” (in my lifetime, in particular via NALA in 1990 for native American languages). The US famously went as far as kidnapping native American children, and the path to any kind of protection has been a long struggle that people still remember. Non-native languages also were systematically eradicated (e.g. famously German after WWII).
At the same time the Civil Rights Act requiring equal access is still interpreted to mean that everybody needs to learn English, state laws still require grading within an English based framework, etc. As a result Americans who grew up in the US can generally speak English, and most people probably consider that a good thing too because in theory it means young Americans are not blocked from climbing the social ladder on grounds of their language.
In contrast, China has 20-30% of Chinese born in China who can’t speak standard Mandarin. There are large differences between more urban and more rural areas. For example, in Shanghai virtually everybody speaks Mandarin and nowadays it has more speakers there than Shanghainese has. But e.g. in Kashgar in the Uyghur AR, around 50% can’t speak Mandarin at all.
In the US you basically have to go to Puerto Rico (which is less integrated than a Chinese AR, e.g. with no voting rights in US elections) to get anything close to that, and even there English is mandatory in schools. Otherwise, Hawaii is the only actual state with two official languages, but Hawaii has very high English proficiency regardless. The same goes for other areas where some other language than English is dominant - the US has areas with >90% Spanish as a first language outside Puerto Rico too, but people there generally also speak English.
So basically if we’re judging these laws by US standards we’re looking at it a bit differently than it looks from a Chinese POV because the US has previously already put significant effort in suppressing languages other than English, which we still remember, and as a result there also is no problem of children of minorities not speaking English and thereby not being able to work and live in most of the US. For the US it would be a regression, but for China it’s also progress in terms of integration and equal rights.