A lot of China issues are more internal, typically with a lot of sweatshops
China does not have a lot of sweatshops.
Last year I would've said censorship is definitely a weaker point for China but given the US right now ehh... Anything China has done on that is happening right now in the US.
Censorship is not a moral quantity, it is a tool. It can be used for good reasons, okay reasons, understandable reasons, cruel reasons, economic repressive reasons, purely reactionary reasons. If you punch a Nazi you are censoring them and I commend you for doing it.
China can be a bit shit to deal with on trade even as a country that does a ton of with them but current US is uhh.. definitely not better.
Define, "a bit shit to deal with". What treatment fo you believe your country deserves?
China is very much trying to make sure Taiwan is China even though Taiwan doesn't seem to want that.
China fought a civil war in the 1940s following the expulsion of imperial Japanese occupation. The communists won. The nationalists, i.e. reactionary capitalists, mass emigrated to Taiwan for a final holdout (they did genocidal things to the indigenous people there btw). The US intervened to prevent the communists from finishing the civil war and reuniting all of China. This was only possible because the US was also pressuring China via the invasion and later partition of Korea and China chose solidarity with their analogs there facing a much greater threat (the US). Since then, both the PRC and Taiwan have claimed all of China. The KMT claims even more than modern China, in fact. The civil war has never ended, it has simply reached a deadlock, with Taiwan serving as a US outpost and manufacturing center.
Public opinion is easy to sway, particularly on polls. We can say that the people of Taiwan don't want war and yet the US wants to use them to provoke China into war. We can say that they prefer the prior status quo of almost one country with two systems, i.e. easy trade and travel with their neighbor, to one of barriers and US propaganda against the PRC.
And what has the PRC done, exactly, to Taiwan?
In general China is a bit of a dick when it comes to boats on what they think is their water even if that's not super agreed (I understand many spots have many overlapping claims from multiple countries).
China is exactly like every other country in having boats in waters that others complain about. Even some landlocked countries. Though it is far less rapacious, per capita, than most. Why are you singling out China?
The shipping what is basically pure garbage globally is shit but not entirely China's fault, because maybe if some business owners hadn't decided that paying the minimum possible for things was a good idea we wouldn't be flooded with trash that morons requested.
These are the consequences of capitalism, not morons or China being bad. Capitalism forces owners to maximize profits any way they can and if that means a 10% cheaper item that breaks twice as much, well they don't care so long as their profits go up. Capitalism also creates a culture of commodity acquisition through the destruction of forms of socialization and self-actualization. So people adopt consumerist hobbies that appear to others as, "buying dumb garbage". China's explicitly stated strategy is to allow capitalist relations in a subset of its economy, particularly for export, in order to build up what's known by Marxists as productive forces. That to survive imperialism and imagine socialist transition, they need to be able to create all the products needed and to rope imperialists into dependency. It seems to be working, wouldn't you say?
China has also advanced massively in two decades. It doesn't just export cheap plastic things. Some of the finest and most durable products come from China.
Would have preferred much better cooperation with COVID but both in the US and where I live (Australia) there are definitely internal issues that also could have dealt with it.
This is also capitalism. The US and Australia are financialized economies premised on commercial rents and appropriate COVID interventions destroyed that model. The financiers demanded higher profits and their states relented. China and other socialist-run countries responded much more appropriately and millions of people would still be alive if others had their model.
It's harder for me to see what's actually going on inside China, I don't read or speak any language aside from English to know if everything is actually relatively fine in China, until I bother looking I mostly see my curated sections of news which while fairly unbiased, tends to not show the good things about anywhere.
Talk to people in China. Watch videos of normal people there doing normal things. It is a normal country with nice people.
Re: the news, focus on media criticism. What are the tropes being played up? Who wrote the article? Who is the editor-in-chief of the rag? What sources do they cite? Are they associated with the MoD? An NGO with MoD ties? Who pays them? Are they representative? When they call someone an expert, why should you believe them? And of course, to properly criticize you will have to acquire a lot of geopolitical knowledge to know when something said is simply false.
I know people sometimes get conveniently disappeared, but I've heard of a dozen cases or so which is more normal than you'd think reasonable for most countries.
This is a chauvinist trope. Chauvinist media calls people in China "missing" with literally zero evidence. Those people regularly have to come out and say, "I wasn't missing, I was just living my life like normal."
But in the US, immigrants are being disappeared on a daily basis on camera.
Directly comparing with the US as opposed to less fucked up countries does make China seem significantly better off, I guess because I'm from Australia where you could fairly argue we are much better
Australia is a US lapdog. Remember AUKUS? Y'all are used to poke and prod China all the time and your MoD runs propaganda operations against China all the time.
Australia is also an Anglo settler state that is continuing its genocide against aboriginal Australians. Aboriginal Australians still fear the state stealing their children over small and normal things, something that does happen and is a holdover from cultural genocidal boarding schools. Australia has not returned lands to the rightful owners and the height of its justice is a piecemeal appeal to tolerance and integration. Australians remain highly racist.
Let's say your example is a Microsoft programmer. They work on a software product that Microsoft sells and they are paid $200k per year. Even at that high wage, Microsoft is pocketing their surplus labor value, otherwise they wouldn't have profits. When companies are so large and have so much income, the exploitation in raw value can actually be even higher than that of a low wage worker. The Microsoft programmer just doesn't feel the pain as much because their labor value is scarce and hard to replace and so they are paid better.
The rest of capitalist relations still exist there as well. Microsoft wants to pay their programmers less. This is why they promote STEM education, bootcamps, etc. They want a large number of unemployed programmers competing for that job so they can drive wages down.
The Marxist concept of exploitation does not imply that all workers are impoverished. The labor aristocracy was already a thing in Marx's time. But it does mean that there is a tendency to drive down wages, i.e. increase exploitation to maximize profit. So over time, in a closed system (e.g. the global working class), wages are driven down.