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So there is a question that has been gnawing at me for the longest time: is PRC... Good? I mean:
I mean, there are obviously some tough things to get over (the whole free speech thing, how they handled COVID with safetyism that would make many in the West blush, all the other usual stuff), but genuinely, honestly... Following the news from China for a few years, I really can't help but envy the Chinese. Take down the communist iconography and I think that many on the right would see it similarly to Japan.
China shows the tradeoff between liberty/freedom and authoritarian state capacity. If the government acts in its own interests at all times and does not care about the people whatsoever except as pawns to be managed and leverage for labor, then you can accomplish a lot of things as a government. If were were playing a geopolitical RTS and the citizens were all NPCs managed by a computer, this would be great. If they're real human beings with feelings and lives and utility functions, this is awful.
Every single measure you mention here, including economic success, all have 0 terminal value in my utility function. They have instrumental value only in-so-far as they can be leveraged towards human flourishing and happiness. China could have 10x the GDP per capita of the U.S. and I'd still consider it a failure if that GDP doesn't translate into the well-being of the people actually living there.
I don't think the West is perfect, but at least we try. China's not even trying to be good.
I think about this a lot with things like the pyramids, "how were ancient people able to build these" well a lot is possible if you have lots and lots of slaves and don't really care about the conditions they're working under.
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The conditions on the ground for most Chinese are fine, plus the Chinese government does a lot to curtail a lot of the own goal stuff that is rife in the West with regards to homelessness and general antisocial behaviors. I'm confused why you think the average Chinese person is at some massive deficit to the average Westerner at this point.
I'm deeply suspicious of the censorship and its effects on signalling. When you have an authoritarian police state that will punish you for complaining, smart people learn not to complain. When your credit score is higher the more positive posts you have about the government on social media, people will post positive things on social media.
I automatically discount any opinions given by people who are paid shills, or are in some way incentivized to exaggerate in a way comparable to this. Literally every Chinese citizen is a shill, therefore I take any apparent public sentiment with a huge grain of salt. If I knew Chinese people in real life I would probably discount their stated opinions significantly less (depending on how well I knew them). But on the internet? I trust nothing. If everything was actually wonderful in China and nobody had complaints then the government wouldn't need to censor complaints. They wouldn't need to censor social media. If everything in China was so wonderful they would be here now telling us about it instead of being kept quarantined away like the North Koreans.
Add to that the sweatshops that produce the Cheap Chinese goods, some anecdotal stories I've heard from North Korean defectors escaping to China and being literally enslaved there, or people stumbling on decomposing bodies from a possible organ farm, and it paints a bleak picture. I expect the average person isn't in abject misery the way they are in North Korea, but there aren't democratic feedbacks to stop that from happening, it's merely the whims of the government.
I've travelled to China a bunch. I'm not gonna pretend I've been to the Tier 7 Sulphur mines to hang out, but the vast majority of Tier 1/2/3 places I've been are perfectly functional cityscapes which are generally cleaner, more pleasant and better developed than the equivalent in the West. You're also vastly overstating the degree of control the Chinese state imposes on low-medium civil whining
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