First thing to recognize that no country or system of governanace is perfect. China has its share of problems just like any other country, they do better in some areas and worse in others. That said, let’s take a look at the claims.

1) The whole Uyghur genocide narrative appears to be largely fabricated. Researchers in Italy just recently released a long report that concludes this narrative is geopolitically motivated.

George Bush’s chief of staff openly said that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED recently admitted to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here’s an excerpt:

Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of Uyghurs were transported to Afghanistan by the CIA for training in guerilla warfare by the mujahideen. When they returned to Xinjiang, they formed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and came under Catli’s expert direction. Graham Fuller, CIA superspy, offered this explanation for radicalizing the Chinese Muslims:

The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them [Muslims] against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan and against the Red Army. The doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter Chinese influence in Central Asia.

I think this is very important context for discussing the problems in the region. In light of the fact that there was a major terrorism problem it seems that China handled it very well, and certainly better than how western nations have dealt with terrorism.

2-3) China does have more restrictions on freedom of political speech than the west. However, it’s not as if there is absolute freedom of speech in the west either. For example, Germany prohibits any promotion of fascism and nazism. Most countries prohibit calls for violence or harm to individuals, and so on. Saying that the west got the balance fundamentally right while China got it fundamentally wrong is a chauvinistic perspective.

Furthermore, while political speech might not be banned in the west, it’s certainly heavily controlled. For example, western media loves to present two sides of any issue no matter how ridiculous the other side may be as in the case of climate change. Yet, strangely we never see a both sides discussion of economics where we get a communist perspective.

People are also uncomfortable expressing their political views publicly if their views stray from the mainstream because it can affect their employability. This is especially true in the domains of politics and economics.

As a result, western economic and political systems have become very rigid and dogmatic. Capitalism is axiomatically accepted as the correct system that’s beyond question despite mounting problems and regular economic crashes caused by this system.

On the other hand, China showed itself to be much more flexible in this regard. Deng reforms integrated aspects of capitalism into overarching socialist framework. This was done through debate and self criticism the sort of which is simply unheard of in the west.

China continues to show political pragmatism and agility that led to China outcompeting the west economically. This would not be possible if Chinese system did not allow and even encourage self criticism.

I think the core difference between China and the west is that Chinese people agreed that socialism and eventual goal of communism is the right approach for politics. There is lively debate within that context, but other political ideologies such as capitalism are rejects the same way Germany and other western countries reject ideologies such as fascism. Meanwhile in the west we still haven’t decided on any single political system and we have many parties trying to steer countries in different directions.

One clear downside of western approach of multiparty governments is that they’re directly at odds with any long term planning. A party might be in power for a few years and then get replaced by a different party. Any projects the former party might have started could be rolled back by the latter. This makes it extremely difficult to tackle large scale problems like climate change effectively.

4) Mass surveillance in China doesn’t appear to be any worse than it is in the west. There is plenty of documented cases of western governments deploying mass surveillance, face recognition, hacking, and other methods at scale. In fact, I would argue that western surveillance is worse because it’s largely done by private companies that sell the data to the highest bidder, including the government. With Chinese model it’s just the government that has access to the data.

I personally see mass surveillance as a negative in both systems, but it’s incorrect to claim that the problem is exclusive to China. This is an example of a popular propaganda tactic in the west where socialist countries are held to a different standard than western ones.

Propagandists will frame problems seen under socialism as being rooted in socialism. However, if these same problems are observed under capitalism then it’s clear that socialism cannot be the root cause. Reality of the situation is that no system is perfect and there will always be problems in human societies because humans are imperfect. All a particular system can do is discourage negative behaviors and encourage positive ones.

5) Both Hong Kong and Taiwan are historically part of China and it should not be surprising that China wants to repatriate them. It also needs to be remembered that US has surrounded China with military bases and regularly conducts military exercises in South China sea. It shouldn’t be surprising that China is concerned about its national security.

Again, it’s worth mentioning that this situation is not unique to China as exact same question can be ask in places like Scotland, Ireland, Catalonia, and Donbas where there are large portions of the population who would like to separate into independent countries.