>In the US it's practically a right of passage to be a young adult and very vocally hate the country, hate the government.

Well, unless ICE murders you at a protest for expressing your hate of the government's actions.

>In China you don't have a life in front of you if you do that.

That's very much not true. China isn't North Korea like Westerners imagine. Unless you riot, take to the streets, or become a big agitator or dissident, Chinese government and media actually does allow some controlled escape valves for regular people to vent about problems, no issue with that. This isn't Stalin's reign of terror.

You'll only get disappeared if you end up becoming a big fish to threaten the CCP, like Jack Ma, but otherwise the CCP don't end disappearing every schmuck who complains about the government.

You might not know this, but as a nation, you don't get very far economically, academically and technologically in the long run by consonantly oppressing your people under a culture of permanent fear of their government. You can't bleed a stone.

And China got where it is, due to its successful policies from the last half-century that brought prosperity and lifted millions of of poverty, it's government has earned a certain level of "buy-in" from the majority of the population, meaning the people are more likely to be cooperative and work with the totalitarian government towards a common set of mutually beneficial goals, rather than wasting their energy trying to mass emigrate out of the country or to fight for democracy.

And that's what so dangerous about this, because unlike the USSR who served in the west as THE model of inevitable failure for such systems, China found a successful form of totalitarian governance, that some western governments are now trying to copy when they saw how effective it is.

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