> People living in fear.
In the former Eastblock people weren't living in fear either, as long as they did not think of sticking their heads up too far above the field in terms of political activism and such. If you did then you were pretty sure to be targeted.
China today is still very repressive when it comes to political freedom.
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2017/china
And as long as they are 'one party rule' I think that it is both strong and for political reasons. Keep in mind that all of politics is ultimately rooted in economy so it is pretty easy to get lost in the mix.
> Population control through forced abortions and murders everywhere (it turned out to be not true).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
It very much turned out to be true, and you can add a very large number of forced sterilizations to that list.
> Evil communist leaders.
That's an opinion, I'm not going to argue with opinions.
> Shit-quality manufacturing (that's the fault of western companies; China manufactures to the specs you give and pay for, it's western companies that decide to cheap out on products).
This is false. China can make quality products but there is also a culture of substitution where quality samples are replaced with lower grade manufacture at later points in a contract to deliver. This has bitten many Western companies that turned to China for their manufacturing and which has caused a lot of companies to bring their quality control to China, just before shipping to save on the amount of stuff shipped that simply did not work or did not work as advertised. This QA issue has been very well documented and can definitely not be laid at the door of the Western companies placing their orders in good faith.
> Those are all things I've been led to believe through media reports.
Media mostly reports, it mostly does not make stuff up. And most of those media reports are backed by at least my personal experience over the years where I will be more than happy to note that this stuff isn't a constant but that there are trends with some stuff improving and other things worsening. If you know your stuff it is very well possible to manufacture quality goods in China.
> The point being, whatever happened there 40 or 60 years ago, currently China is not that much different from the US
That is hilarious in so many ways. China is extremely different from the US along almost any axis that you care to name. Other than that of course the Chinese are people, just like Americans and Europeans but that's about it.
> and unlike the latter, it's only getting better.
This may very well be true, but then again, that's a function of where they were only a few decades ago. It's hard to remain at the top of something if there are other parties that wish to ascend, in dutch we have a proverb that reads 'standing still is going backwards' (I'm not sure how well that translates), but it fairly accurately sums up the sentiment.