You can't run for the local legislature unless you are approved. They stop some people from leaving at the airport if they protested. They arrest you for minor acts of resistance like the color of your shirt. They removed statues that were commemorating the Tiananmen Square protests. If you are a westerner then maybe you can keep living your life though.
You're simply not being serious. In the US you can commemorate any massacre that happened in the US. In Hong Kong you're no longer allowed to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre.
In parts of USA you are forbidden from glorifying the biggest separatist crisis, the Civil War. The US government actively destroys monuments to the separatist side of the civil war.
You can absolutely glorify the south in the civil war, and people do it. You can even do things that most consider abhorrent, you can glorify slavery if you want, speak positively about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. You can glorify the assassination of any US president who was assassinated in fact. Some people won't like it, but you can do it and no state goons are going to come disappear you in the night. It is not illegal anywhere in the US.
Do any of those things publicly in the average US city and let me know how that works out for your career (and therefore ability to afford housing and healthcare).
The government allowing you to celebrate slavery doesn’t mean fellow citizens are obliged to employ you. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from repercussions.
Complete nonsense. Authority is necessary to guarantee human rights when you are dealing with groups of more than ~1000 people. Anarchy at that scale leads to massive human rights violations.
Americans/Anglos are historically inept at governance and concluded that all governments are inept and evil.
If de jure, than neither USA nor PRC are authoritarian because both have multiple political parties.
If de facto, than both USA and PRC or authoritarian. USA in particular is governed by an unelected establishment of NatSec/Finance/Oil elites; an oligarchy in the purest sense. Who elected Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan to orchestrate the Ukraine wedge?
In the US elected representatives in a few places have decided to remove statues of proponents of slavery, after significant public pressure. This is not happening to statues commemorating deaths of soldiers or protestors. And nothing stops you from waving a confederate flag and "celebrating your heritage" if that is your belief system. Actually, the state-funded police department would at least pretend to send officers to separate you from counter-protesters and attempt to make sure both sides are protected. This seems quite different from removing statues commemorating student protests (that went bloody due to state violence)
On the contrary, an equally important base principle of the modern democracies coming out of the Enlightenment is that the minority should be protected from the "tyranny of the majority"[1]. Don't get me wrong, it is easy to agree with you that the majority of the Chinese people might enjoy the strong-arm stability provided by their totalitarian government, but there is no way around the fact that minority opinions in China frequently get brutally stomped out, while minority opinions in (flawed) democracies like the US have many (imperfect) protections.
