Fun fact: you can email authors of papers and ask for a PDF. Authors don't get paid when you buy a paper (in fact it usually costs money to publish) and they'll generally be happy to send out their work to anyone interested.
Friends of mine who have moved away from China. One of them had police at their door in China for social media posts that were friendly to Uyghurs (not even anything to do with the genocide, just general friendliness as a "we're all Chinese" kind of message). Being taken to police stations for even slightly questioning the state narrative is terrifying.
Our restrictions were basically lifted after four weeks in 2020 because that was enough to eliminate the virus. I think going a bit authoritarian with the lockdown maximised our freedom in the long run that year.
We had a four week (incredibly strict) lockdown in 2020 and then life returned to normal because we eliminated the virus. In late 2021 the delta variant ruined all that and the government attempted a half-assed lockdown which didn't do much and that's where a lot of the anger came from.
It uses other signals too, like what other sites you've visited with that checkbox on it, what CloudFlare has seen your IP address doing in the past, etc.
The google one is able to see if you're logged into a google account and take that into account.
There's even a new variant of the Google captcha that is invisible and doesn't even bother to show a checkbox.
This is propaganda for the imperialist fascist regime that currently runs the Russian Federation.