China is a terrible country to be a minority or dissident. But then again so is much of the world, even developed countries, only a few decades ago to be a black person in the US was horrendous even though the country itself was incredibly wealthy, and while most of China was living in extreme poverty. This attitude of "but we are better" reeks of an adult abusing a child because they can't run as fast.
Take Singapore for example: consistently ranks in the top of quality of life, yet an incredibly dangerous place to practice dissent. China is trying to emulate that model.[0] There's big investments from the Middle East in other social media platforms and I'm yet to see any of them clamping down on content criticising the Saudis.
> because Europe shares America's values of freedom
Interesting take. We certainly look and speak similarly, but there's plenty of differences. Regarding healthcare and education policies who do you think Europe is more similar to: the US or China?
Regarding censorship who do you think is closer again? European states regularly demand removal of social media content, prohibit news outlets reporting certain stories and imprison people for speech that would be clearly protected in the US. [1][2]
In the UK and Australia there are defamation laws that will bankrupt people for simply stating a provably true fact.[3]
The right to bear arms is virtually non-existent, especially for handguns and assault rifles.
The 4th amendment is likewise barely applicable in most Western countries, though sadly that seems to be the case in the US too nowadays.
Things like racial discrimination and LBGT rights certainly are similar. Workers rights too, though I'd call that more a function of national wealth rather than culture.
> ethnic minorities are imprisoned [4]
I'd like to put to you a hypothetical situation where a large region of the USA has a majority Muslim population which has been waging a low level terror campaign for 3 decades? What do you think the response would be? It certainly wouldn't be pretty, the US has no qualms about killing US citizens in assassinations without trial.[5]
Given the prison population in Iraq and Afghanistan during wartime and the horrors[6] found there, it's perhaps a case of walking in their shoes for a day. Democracy won't solve this, the majority of people in China support what's happening in Xinjiang. Anti-muslim sentiment is incredibly common.
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/arti...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-19/free-s...
> To Americans, the idea of the government forcing social media to censor posts may seem to resemble China’s internet censorship. Such legislation wouldn’t just be unconstitutional; it would be almost unthinkable.
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/17/europes-free-speech-apo...
> Google, Facebook, and Twitter announced in December that they would work to delete anti-migrant sentiments voiced on their networks within 24 hours of request
[3] https://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/dissent/documents/defamation...
> if what you said was true but not considered by the court to be in the public interest, you can be successfully sued for defamation
[4] https://reason.com/archives/2015/04/16/can-the-president-kil...
> he was within eyesight in Yemen of about 12 Yemeni intelligence agents and four CIA agents, all of whom collectively could have arrested him. He was not engaged in any unlawful behavior. He was unarmed and sitting at an outdoor cafe with a friend and his teenage son and the son's friend. All four, Americans all, were murdered by the drones dispatched from Virginia.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prison
[6] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/28/us/mass-incarceration-fiv...
> nearly 2.2 million adults were held in America's prisons... nearly half of all inmates are locked up for drug charges...African-Americans continue to make up a disproportionate amount of the prison population