I think you're looking at entirely the wrong metric.
3 million Uyghurs in internment camps have increased quality of life? ~400 million still stuck ineural farms? The gap between the to 1% in China and the bottom is vastly larger than in the US. And of course it is easy for China to “improve” coming from the ruins of the cultural revolution. There was nowhere to go but up.
I feel that over-priveleged peoples in the West with a really good life and pretty much every comfort available, often tend to just look at these superficial charts and numbers and tend to gloss over the context in these other countries.
It's pretty sad really that you are comparing China to the USA in this way just by mentioning that the USA is a oligarchy and somehow that's worse than being in China. The US at least has the option. Chinese people do not.
This worshipping of communist governments and downplaying the USA's freedoms and comforts really need to tone down a bit.
There are superficial differences in the tribal totems and rhetorical promises used to promote conformity, and in the mechanics of manipulation and repression.
Beneath that, the dynamics are very similar.
Life can be quite pleasant in any of the above if you're upper-middle class.
If you're on the wrong side of any of these regimes and on the receiving end of institutionalised government violence, it really isn't.
And there's no shortage of e.g. college students from China who want to return after their studies instead of trying to stay around America and get a work visa. They're smart, and they're under no Chinese censorship when in America, so it seems to me that one is not vastly better than the other.
(Also the unspoken question is how China, the USSR, Korea, etc. would be were it not for their economic suffocation by the US. I didn't bring this up in the context of the Great Firewall, but if we're talking about quality of life it's absolutely relevant. It's important for the US to buy Huawei because not doing so when they have a better product is just repeating the same immoral economic suffocation.)
Of course, there are those that don’t. That’s beside the point, there always are.
>What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...