(At this point, I jumped up and yelled 'Down with Clinton! Down with Clinton' and had them do it with me. We laughed, and I told them people do that all over America, and it's no big deal.)
I told him that the only reason our system works is that we criticize each other, or we'd have to fight about everything we disagreed upon. America may be a young nation, I pointed out, but it has one of the oldest governments on the planet, exactly because of this.
(I also pointed out subversively that their government would be as stable as ours, if they could tolerate the same dissent from their citizens that I showed earlier towards mine.)
All in all, I found them to be adequately aware and mostly supportive of how our government functions. They were very open to the idea of becoming more like us in a way that would not offend their government (good luck!) They had more knowledge of western life than I expected, but less political means to get there, too. Tiananmen really set back the democracy crowd there, and the few that will still talk about it don't know how to proceed.