I don’t mean this to disagree, it’s a genuine question: to what degree can one really conduct a public poll about the relative merit of the Chinese government within China? In the US, there’s no credible argument (or at least no widespread belief) that saying bad things about the government to a pollster will get you incarcerated; as an outsider, I don’t know that the same is true in China.

It sounds like any bad reports you hear come out of China is evidence that China is bad, and any good reports you hear come out of China is evidence that China is lying or has brainwashed its population. That's a pretty flawed epistemology in my opinion.

Trying to figure out truth or fiction from China is complicated by the CCP's direct censorship/influence.

Good news comes almost direct from CCP. Bad news is from anywhere-but-CCP.

Neither good/bad news can be judged as 100% true or false but the "CCP influence" means I have to use a fudge factor that decreases the trustworthiness of good news in comparison to bad news.

It doesn't outright invalidate "good news" but it introduces a significant element of doubt.

I don’t believe that’s what I said or what I asked.