People in the US don't understand the ways that the US is authoritarian and genocidal. The average lib or conservative alike is well trained in being able to casually wave away events as disgusting as murdering the indigenous peoples to steal their land, slaveowners writing about the inalienable freedoms of man and building a country on slave power, Japanese internment, etc. We got all this here manufactured consent. I'm not going to sit here and say I don't trust the word of Chinese citizens. Just that capitalist systems are great at manufacturing consent and it seems insane to me to suggest that China isn't doing that as well. And it makes it really difficult to evaluate what is actually going on there when the American media is manufacturing sinophobic consent here and Chinese media is manufacturing their own consent there.