> ...China, which leads the world in published scientific papers...

Try to publish in China a scientific paper with real COVID numbers and you will see how democratic the country is.

> ...the Soviet Union, which definitely assigned a lot of value to objective science...

Unless the objective science throw a threw a bad light on the soviet system in which case science was dismissed. Just take a look at the story behind Chernobyl.

You won't find objectivity in a totalitarian system.