They’re not even remotely the same. The U.S. has serious problems with racism, mass incarceration, police brutality, unaffordable health care, etc.
But that isn’t even close to the problems China has with organ harvesting, concentration camps in Xinjiang, mass corruption, food fraud, political prisoners etc.
The outcomes are radically different.
I would much rather be called a pragmatist than a patriot.
Both there and here, there's political work being done, each with their own ideas of what is best for their people. We can argue that their great firewall effort is oppressive for example, but on the other hand, they are probably more than happy the US has outsourced manufacturing to China to such an extensive degree. Both countries ostensibly "work as intended". I guess the end result of all that work still remains to be seen.
Another point that I think is worth pondering about is whether majority opinion is necessarily correct. The US response to covid, for example, has been all over the place, with places like San Francisco, CA being more strict and successful, to places like Minot, ND being hit really hard.
Like you, I'm also all for pragmatism, but I think things like the early perception of the epidemic in the west shows that sometimes the right course of action might sometimes fly in the face of public opinion.
One could argue that a cacophony of opinions spanning the entire spectrum of possibilities isn't necessarily much better than having no freedom of press, if the end result is people literally believing deceptive propaganda, as opposed to merely being afraid of voicing informed, dissenting opinions.
IMHO, patriotism should be about defending the values of a country and calling out BS when it's appropriate, instead of merely defending the country's name without concern for the substance of the criticism.