You can roughly divide the Chinese population into the well educated and the rest; the boundary of course is fluid. It doesn't mean the latter category isn't smart or doesn't have college education. It means that those people didn't know the kinds of freedom (speech, assembly, etc) that Westerners think are the pillars of democracy. They didn't live through or have memories of a China on the verge of having a beginnings of a real democracy in the 1980s before the massacre killed it. They didn't know there is a vast Internet outside China so tightly controlled by the government as to be unusable. They didn't know President Xi had been increasingly instituting "red" policies that were worryingly similar to the 1960s. Those are the people who had newly gained wealth and didn't know any better. They could very well equate material wealth with happiness without yet realizing anything more.