Well, on one hand you have mass ideological repression, concentration camps designed for cultural genocide against ethnic minorities, and censorship that means you can't trust common knowledge, so we don't even know if the persistent rumors of mass organ harvesting from religious dissidents are true. But on the other hand you have the capacity to manufacture respirators and stop pandemics dead in their tracks, not to mention most of the world's microelectronics (particularly if you include ROC), and PRC was vaccinating people in July of last year, only four months after the first vaccine was developed (in March in the USA).
Meanwhile, the EU has banned borax on grounds that amount to pure superstition, California has banned xylene, Texas only recently repealed a years-long lab glassware ban, the US Supreme Court didn't legalize screen-scraping until this year, and the USA still has 1% of its adult population imprisoned, just like shortly after the lead-driven crime wave crested 30 years ago (I guess its legislature does get some things done; they also direct the world's biggest military budget). Also, the US maaybe just passed 50% of the population believing in evolution, and gifted programs are being cut out of their high schools because they "promote inequality". And apparently police killing people with impunity is a major political cause in the US now? And let's not forget that Armadillo Aerospace had to abandon their working rocket engine design and restart from scratch because nobody would sell them peroxide, probably due to the US regulatory regime surrounding product liability. And when Clinton launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative in 02000, instead of diamondoid mechanosynthesis we got the fraudulent rebranding of any random submicron particle research, down to the study of medieval stained glass, as "nanotechnology".
In short, the US and EU are stupid enough that they're dooming themselves, regardless of whatever happens in China. I can empathize.
Having your government run by the kind of people who would vote for Donald Trump might be okay as long as the government doesn't control anything important, but inevitably putting the foolish and stupid in charge of the wise and learned is going to end in disaster, as it has with the covid pandemic. On the other hand, dictatorships and monarchies are no guarantee of wise leadership, often the opposite; they tend to oscillate randomly, often when succession happens. Marcus Aurelius is succeeded by Commodus, who is succeeded by Pertinax, then Didius Julianus, and the country is thrown into catastrophe. Qin Shi Huang may have been an asshole who destroyed China's cultural heritage, but he wasn't the fool Qin Er Shi was.
I'm not sure Star Trek is a worthy ideal; it's a militarist naval soap opera that doesn't begin to grapple with the political and psychological implications of post-scarcity civilization. Let's have the courage to imagine a future worth living in, and then create it.