It is an excellent point that the well managed Chinese economy and PR apparatus has helped the average Chinese citizen.

You would be singing a different tune if you were to come under Chinese rule.

I worked in China under Chinese rule, there's frustrations, but it was mostly fine. Know / related to many Chinese nationals, spectrum from FLG practitioners to purged officials. From rich coastal provinces to poor inland ones. China's a stressful place, everyone bitches about how things are, the loudest from their multi million dollar tier1 condos. But almost no one wants to go back to Mao days, except the FLG practitioner because they missed ideological purity of the old party. People can sing whatever, and if you believe the recent Harvard surveys, they sing mostly good things. The fact that they're singing in the first place is unparalleled freedom compared to Mao times where private speech got you fucked, i.e. what the Uyghurs are going through now, which is to say 99% of the country has moved past that. It's an unambiguous improvement. First ever civil code just passed this year as well.

It's only been 30 years, about how long it took Taiwan/Korea to liberalize, except things take longer when you have 1.4B people and antagonism from global superpower. Taiwan/Korean dictatorship got unambiguous and sustained US support. Under Xi, it's 2 steps forward and 1 step back. Realistically it's is 5 steps forward and 1 step back, but west likes to paint that 1 step as a chasm.

>Each one of those people is as important as you or me.

Yeah they are.

The reality is also that frontier territories have been historically spared the harsh repressions rest of country / populus went through postwar like cultural revolution, great leap forward, strict family planning etc, simply by virtue of being too far. Enter infrastructure and billions in spent on connectivity. Secessionism had to be reign in eventually, and current systems has as much carrots as sticks. Also carrots that was not available to a much poorer China. There's a reason why disproportionate resources are diverted to Tibet and XJ for development. Carrots that freedom + human rights countries typically do not extend to their own repressed minorities. Indigenous camps in Canada still don't have clean water, because voters in democracies do not want to give carrots when virtue signalling is sufficient. CCP doesn't have to listen to majority Han reee about spending money on minorities. Last time I calculated enough money poured into XJ to cut every Uygure a 200K RMB / 30K USD check.

The fundamental issue is carrots are not enough, you cannot pay people to secularize/sinicize/integrate. You have to indoctrinate, not just future generations, but also current. This is not endorsement of the policies. Merely it is predictable next step with new Chinese capabilities, further made inevitable by salafist terrorism fermented by blowback of foreign policy decisions of USSR/West/ME and other geopolitical factors. Things would be very different in a world without mujahideens inspiring drama in XJ or CIA fucking around with Tibet or general US pivot to Asia or current great powers competition. This is why CCP is obsessed with with foreign meddling. Nevermind that Tibet/XJ is 2/3 of Chinese land and contain vast security benefits. More relevant to "as important as you or me", these minorities are _more_ important than the average Han. Security is paramount state responsibility, more so in an authoritarian one because there is no one else to shift blame. And even then blame is no replacement for overwhelmingly excessive counter-terrorism response where possible. Incidentally why XJ is getting the full measure while Tibet gets half. That's baseline populist expectation, CCP is adding the carrots when the people scream for sticks. A democratic China would just lockup the Uyghurs and Tibetans in perennial prison industrial complexes like US or sequester them away in generation ghettos like France. An imperial China would actually genocide them. Trivially. That's the dynamic of in a capitalist ethnostate with "problematic" minorities. What currently exists is not the best timeline, but it's also not remotely the worst for security logic, which again, trumps all other considerations. Incidentally, this applied to HK, and will apply to Taiwan.

What a depressing world you must live in. In reality, the news is pretty good: Freedom has expanded dramatically. Freedom was expanding in China until Xi took over, with many working and planning for democracy. A local downturn isn't at all 'inevitable'; we can easily turn it around.

Freedom has expanded dramatically in the U.S. too. Minorities such as Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Irish, Italians, Germans (once reviled!) and more are now unquestioned members of society. Women went from an oppressed majority to full members of the workplace, expanding participation in government, etc. Few would dream now of suggesting women shouldn't work - something that was a norm a couple of generations ago. LGTBQ+ people's rights have expanded: They can marry, they don't lose their jobs over it, they can serve openly in the military and in government.

African-Americans enjoy far more rights: Obama was elected, as was Kamala Harris. Education has expanded; discrimination is socially unacceptable - no politician would survive using certain language. Law enforcement abuse of African-Americans is widely seen as a problem. Even Republicans voted to remove Confederate names from military bases.

We still have a long way to go, including for African-Americans, women in the workplace, LGBTQ+, Muslims, and more. But to suggest oppression is inevitable is just ignorant; it denies the facts. One wonders why some people seem to want it to be true?