I think the question to ask is what results we see from maximizing freedom of speech, and what impact that has on our society. Look at things like QAnon, antivaxxers, right wing movements and so on, all of these things are a direct byproduct of western style of freedom of speech. And this of course applies to corporate media as well with media channels like Fox that propagandize their audiences, companies using their freedom of speech to disseminate mass disinformation as fossil fuel industry did, and so on. Are these outcomes a price worth paying?

And I guess we’ll have to disagree on whether what CPC does is justified or not. I think the results they’ve produced speak for themselves. Communist party lifted a billion people out of poverty, and continues to improve lives for the majority of the people with every decade. The exact opposite pattern is seen in the west however as quality of life continues to plummet.

This is a great explanation of how the party is structured, and it shows that there is far more grassroots participation than there is in western democracies.

What matters to me the most is that the government works in the interest of the majority, and that people have input in the decision making process. CPC appears to do a much better job in that regard than vast majority of western democracies, and the improving material conditions for people in China are a direct result of that.

Compare this with a recent study analyzing decades of policy in US that found the following to be true:

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

People can use VPNs and services that avoid data collection in China as well if they put some effort into it. However, I would argue that for the vast majority of people it’s companies like Facebook that manipulate public behavior that are a far bigger concern. Only a tiny percentage of the population uses platforms like Signal and we see that most people have very little regard for their privacy making it easy to exploit them.

I wouldn’t agree that it is worse in the west than in china, as in the west anyone still has the opportunity to avoid services which threaten to sell your data.

You are talking from ignorance. Both ignorance of the nature and state of surveillance here (yes, I live in China) and of the ubiquity of surveillance in the west and how much of it the state has access to.

Facebook tracks you if you have an account or not. Twitter tracks you if you have an account or not. Phone systems track you if you have any kind of mobile phone at all. In extreme cases, you can be surveilled from other people’s phones. While it is in theory possible to live free of surveillance in the west, it would involve actions and activities that would be extremely impractical.

Surveillance is surveillance, whether done by corporate entities who cooperate with actual nation-states or directly by the government. (And, by the way, most surveillance in China is … exactly this variety, just like the USA.) Abrogation of free speech is abrogation of free speech, whether, again, done by corporate entities (and, again, the major source of censorship in China is exactly this variety, just like the USA) or by governments directly.