Think about it this way, if you were a Chinese citizen would you rather work in a harsh factory setting or work as a subsistence farmer and risk starvation because it didn’t rain enough one year? Because that was literally the choice. There were no other options.

The reason why the Chinese government maintains a high level of support from Chinese citizens is not because they’re great propagandists. Rather it’s because hundreds of millions of people went from extreme poverty as peasants to living stable middle class lives within a few decades.

Why do you see that as such a bad thing? Would you prefer all these people remain in poverty as they have in other countries such as India or the Philippines? I don’t get it.