Chinese views of the U.S.

In a recent post from a site I follow (which basically just translates popular Chinese BBS topics) I was suddenly reminded as to how ignorant people can be of things that are far away, that they perceive as having a very small impact on their lives, and which they have no personal experience of. I am sure that this can apply to many countries and many peoples. How many U.S. citizens know where Suriname is? How many Europeans understand the ethnic/linguistic diversity of China? How many South Africans know how the Japanese political system work? Of course, is also is perfectly logical to me that people are unaware of things that are completely irrelevant to their everyday life. I myself, in a slightly confrontational situation, was made aware of this in myself about a year ago when a Russian acquaintance berated me for having never even heard of the largest city in the eastern half of Russia. But what my attention was drawn to from this article in specific where some of the comments people had written which described situations in other countries. Rather than summarizing them, I think I will just post these in their entirety below:

英语绵绵 (on Tianya) & 七夜 (on LiuLiu):

All this is easy to fix, just use violence. China uses the hukou system to keep the poor population from settling in cities, and then uses chengguan [thuggish city management officials who are supposed to keep order on the streets but who often end up abusing citizens, see here and here] to beat the rabble to death. The cities will then look very nice.

bjwh50: (responding to above comment)

Actually, this is exactly how America does it, using violence to beat the Indians [Native Americans] to death, pushing the Asian, African, and poor out into the country, running the poor white people into the surrounding outskirts of the cities. America’s police are even more terrible than China’s chengguan. If you’re within two meters of a police officer, you have to raise your hands, otherwise American police have the right to shoot you dead.

The specific thing that I find interesting is the claim of the second poster (bjwh50) that "If you’re within two meters of a police officer, you have to raise your hands, otherwise American police have the right to shoot you dead." I do not know where the poster got this opinion, but the fact that it is being expressed, and therefore spread, is somewhat alarming to me. I readily admit that the U.S. police force is far from the best in the world, for I also know that this claim isn't true (right?). If this kind of mis-information is common on the Chinese-language internet, then the perceptions of many Chinese people toward the U.S. might be based off a a United States which is quite different from the real United States. Of course, U.S. citizens do the same thing to China.