from what i’ve gathered i’d say china is basically as good as most developed countries, with the quirk that it has a fucking bonkers huge population and unlike a lot of the other high-population-density countries the population is really concentrated in the cities rather than the whole country just being a single continous shanty town.
And as a result of both the absolute size of the population, and the fact that they live in high-density and quite new cities (and a lot of infrastucture in general is basically from the past 100 years if even that), it means that you get things like an extensive high speed train network and whatnot.

So it’s like if france had 12 Parises and a fairly repressive government. Though it should be noted that chinese politics seems significantly less terrible on a local level, and at this point the rest of the world has started catching up on the whole dystopian government thing…

Certain aspects of life are bad in China.

In the US, there was a failed conman and a failed reality TV character (same person) who campaigned on making the country worse but claimed it’d make the country better (while not actually expecting to get elected), and people decided that he should be president. They elected him again recently.

The alternative party seems to campaign on “Let’s make the country less worse and more slowly”. Anyone who campaigns on making the country better doesn’t make it far in politics.

So yeah, it makes sense that life in the US has been getting objectively worse.

Yeah but can they own a bazooka-flamethrower combo or hurl racist slurs in public whenever they want? Checkmate.

Yeah sure, unless you hold a picture of Winnie the Pooh in public. You’ll be arrested and imprisoned/disappeared for life… Or say anything about tiananmen square. You’ll get 7 years but for sure will be disappeared shortly before release. That’s the quality of life Lemmy users crave 😂😂😂

Edit: BRING ON THE DOWNVOTES YOU HYPOCRITICAL AUTHORITARIAN WORSHIPPING TANKIES