This is a flat out lie.

You can absolutely glorify the south in the civil war, and people do it. You can even do things that most consider abhorrent, you can glorify slavery if you want, speak positively about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. You can glorify the assassination of any US president who was assassinated in fact. Some people won't like it, but you can do it and no state goons are going to come disappear you in the night. It is not illegal anywhere in the US.

Do any of those things publicly in the average US city and let me know how that works out for your career (and therefore ability to afford housing and healthcare).

The government allowing you to celebrate slavery doesn’t mean fellow citizens are obliged to employ you. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from repercussions.

This supports my thesis that America's primary value is anti-authoritarianism and doesn't actually care about human rights.

The diminishment of authoritarianism is a necessary precondition for human rights.

Complete nonsense. Authority is necessary to guarantee human rights when you are dealing with groups of more than ~1000 people. Anarchy at that scale leads to massive human rights violations.

Americans/Anglos are historically inept at governance and concluded that all governments are inept and evil.

I believe we’re facing a language barrier, not a core philosophical disagreement.

Authoritarianism is government by absolute (or near absolute) control of a single body. North Korea, China, Russia being prime examples.

De facto or de jure?

If de jure, than neither USA nor PRC are authoritarian because both have multiple political parties.

If de facto, than both USA and PRC or authoritarian. USA in particular is governed by an unelected establishment of NatSec/Finance/Oil elites; an oligarchy in the purest sense. Who elected Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan to orchestrate the Ukraine wedge?

In the US elected representatives in a few places have decided to remove statues of proponents of slavery, after significant public pressure. This is not happening to statues commemorating deaths of soldiers or protestors. And nothing stops you from waving a confederate flag and "celebrating your heritage" if that is your belief system. Actually, the state-funded police department would at least pretend to send officers to separate you from counter-protesters and attempt to make sure both sides are protected. This seems quite different from removing statues commemorating student protests (that went bloody due to state violence)

I guarantee you that more Chinese people approve of their government's approach to separatism than the Americans do.

i.e. more Americans per capita support the Confederacy than Chinese support Western separatist movements in China.

If you have been to both places, this should be obvious.

That is true (and pretty obvious), but the attitude to separatism was not remotely relevant to my argument, which is the whole point.

If most people support it, then it is the will of the people. To oppose that would be undemocratic. Not that complicated.

On the contrary, an equally important base principle of the modern democracies coming out of the Enlightenment is that the minority should be protected from the "tyranny of the majority"[1]. Don't get me wrong, it is easy to agree with you that the majority of the Chinese people might enjoy the strong-arm stability provided by their totalitarian government, but there is no way around the fact that minority opinions in China frequently get brutally stomped out, while minority opinions in (flawed) democracies like the US have many (imperfect) protections.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority