The USA is also an authoritarian State, it just has better marketing.
I live in Taiwan. I'm no fan of the CPC. But if you zoom out a bit, it's kinda hard to distinguish the two beyond Americans winning global cultural victory (CPC propaganda is still goofy and obvious).
Point at tiananmem square, an atrocious massacre of their own citizenry. The USA has done this - it has locked its citizens in concentration camps, supported their enslavement and recaptured the ones that managed to free themselves, bombed wealthy neighborhoods of the wrong race, had soldiers fire upon striking workers and peaceful protesters. America just has no Tank Man photo and much more subtle media relations - ostensibly free media but in reality controlled through the mutual interests of the billionaire owners of the media conglomerates and the multi millionaire politicians.
The CPC did a genocide in Xinjiang. They were very good at information control here, it's almost impossible to find even an image from the inside of one of their concentration camps. The USA funded a genocide in Palestine, but it can maintain a sort of non culpability. At any point in time the USA can turn on its Israeli allies, and my cynical expectation is that when the government becomes flagrantly fascist enough they'll just blame the Jews and call it done. But, until now, they've maintained an extraordinarily effective marketing campaign propping up Israel as a bastion of freedom and democracy in a demonic environment,values it's managed to market across the entire world that isn't the PRC or cuba or Venezuela, to where people in other countries will say "I can do what I want, it's a free country" even in countries where that really isn't the case e.g. for speech in the UK for example. In actuality it's a more racialized pitch - the Israelis are more credibly white, the Muslims are, well, Muslims. Or Brown. Whichever. But they have this massive marketing apparatus (decades of film and TV) smoothing over these racialized concepts into "freedom and democracy vs savagery and chaos," whereas the CPC with their racialized version just had Han and Normal vs Muslim and Kinda Weird (maybe dangerous!). A much more despicable pitch on the surface which is why they didn't get away with a televised genocide the way America and Israel got away with decades of apartheid against Palestine.
Anyway in summary if we take a look at all the bad the CPC vs the USA have done in their lifetimes, idk man at best the scales at balanced, worse case I think America has been worse for the world overall. I would be curious if people that disagree would be willing to do so with the context of American imperialism in mind - interfering in south America and the middle East for example. Is it still better than a country that has one imperialist action (Tibet) and a genocide under its belt?
I'll start by recommending you look up whataboutism, and learn about why it's a fallacious form of argumentation. There's definitely a non-fallacious way of making your argument, but that's your job.
I also don't think your assessment of the relative histories is reliable, but for our purposes here, that's all largely beside the point, because the degree of national security alignment of domestic companies in China compared to the United States are at completely different orders of magnitude, which is the pertinent issue when considering harm reduction here.
When did the concept of "a free country" arise, and what did it mean? It seems to have been in use in the 1600s. Here it is in a tract written, apparently, around 1689 in England:
https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-tract-su...
The freedoms in that instance are freedom of religion, and democracy. (Democracy, the franchise, was limited to about 10% of men, under rules that varied locally from "you have to own a house" to "you have to own the entire region".)
But here the concept is again in ancient times:
https://archive.org/details/BiblicalCollectionPrintedBetween...
This is (a translation of) Josephus, writing in the first century about a speech by a Roman senator from the time when Claudius was put on the throne, with lines like "our natural freedom", "breath of liberty", and "the Liberty of former Times, that was dead and gone before ever I came into the World ..." I can't work out what that freedom was all about - Claudius came after Caligula, though, so you can make a good guess - but evidently this kind of concept is much older than the United States.
I also found the phrase "it's a free country" in Uncle Tom's Cabin, where the freedom in question is the freedom to control slaves.
So the concept is:
• Not modern,
• Not well defined,
• But not meaningless, either.
My meaning is more like, St. Nicholas and his flying sleigh and reindeer have existed since at least the 1800s, Father Christmas as well, Sinterklaas even earlier most likely, but Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus as the world knows him in 1930s, and the USA did the same for the modern concept of "free country" or "democracy." A couple decades of radio, television, and film dominance was the method.
Running with that metaphor, Sinterklaas (freedom and democracy) actually exists, and even when people invoke the Coca-Cola version they're still aspiring to something with a grain of truth to it. It doesn't merely simplify to "us and them" but also contains some actual meaning relating to actual forms of freedom, when people take the trouble to add the depth back in instead of lazily designating outsiders.
I guess the US have a kind of Tank Man photo. The girl from Vietnam.
About media. For me, since Trump second term, I just can't watch Superhero movies (DC / Marvel). It just feels strange and wrong for me. Also movies like the Den of Thieves (1), the feel just plain wrong with a brutal police.
This is your annual reminder that white Muslims do in fact exist.
This is a gentle reminder that it really doesn't matter what the color of a Muslim's skin is to those who care to distinguish someone as Muslim or not-Muslim. To the racist right wing machine, those that are undeniably white (say, a blond haired blue eyed nord), will be called "Muslim" or "Jew" or "Antifa" or "queer" or "trans" and that'll be that, their whiteness is revoked.
Whiteness, like any race, is a purely cultural concept rooted in the shifting reality of day to day sociology.
A man with as-of-yet undefined politics was identified as the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk. Before he was found, a governor said, "I really hope he's not one of us." When it was discovered that he was a young white male from a Mormon MAGA family, the media machine that had been calling for the elimination of the opposition party in the USA (or various minorities such as LGBT people) went silent for about a day until it was discovered that perhaps the assassin's roommate may have been trans. Immediately he was othered. Calls for prayer for a lost young man turned again into calls for violence against trans people. I imagine Governor Cox breathing a sigh of relief. Whiteness revoked!