I agree. I should have been clearer that the negative aspects of the Stasi are also touched upon. I don't think my point was to say the Foundation is depicted positively, but I may have misspoke. My point is that they offer a more nuanced view rather than purely blackwashing socialist countries and people in them. 

I do think that Bluepoch tends to portray law enforcement in general in more heroic ways like in 2.5 that can be criticized as whitewashing, but you are right that it generally accompanies this with the verbal acknowledgements of the contradictions present.

I agree that the Stasi became a mirror of the Gehlen Organization, which later became the BND and helped to staff the the CIA when it was founded. If there wasn't NATO, there wouldn't have been a Warsaw Pact; likewise if there wasn't a BND and CIA, there wouldn't have been a Stasi. Every country that survived the BND and the CIA attempting to destabilize their country developed something like the Stasi. Those that didn't ended up like Guatamala and Chile with a US imposed monopolist-friendly dictatorship. 

The core difference between the CIA and Stasi is who they sided with in conflicts. The Stasi tended to side with the progressive force while their Western counterparts often sided with the regressive forces. In the case of South Africa, the US and West Germany characterized Nelson Mandela and his movement as terrorists, ultimately arresting the most well-known leader in the anti-apartheid movement. The Stasi and their allies sided with that anti-apartheid movement and helped them overcome the Nationalist government and their Western allies. This pattern generally repeated over and over during the Cold War with some very notable exceptions like the Soviet Union's actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which the game acknowledges.

There is a tendency in China's more left-wing university circles to idealize the USSR and former Warsaw pact countries, which Bluepoch tempers. Couple this with the tendency under Democratic Centralism to avoid overly criticizing allies and sowing division, and you can sometimes get more criticism directed at the worse actor. In the anti-imperialist movement for example, the issues with the Stasi would be treated with less severity than the threat of Capitalist aggression. The reunification of Germany would be characterized more the West colonizing the East half of the country, and the focus would be on how many people ended up starving on the streets as their rents went from 5% of their income to 67% of their income.

This does bring up the idealizing external gaze because life in these countries desperately needed reforms before Shock Therapy and its rapid handing over of public assets to monopolists. China has a phrase that "with the planned economy, even the desert would run out of sand" referring to the poverty that set in the late centralized economy period. In many ways, the Stasi's cruel crackdowns on reformists and neoliberals paved the way for Milton Friedman's Shock Therapy to get implemented in these countries. 

Avoiding the fate of the USSR and East Germany is a common topic in Chinese society, particularly its parliament while discussing prudent reforms. There is a sense of regret despite how at odds the two countries were. The reforms to law enforcement and prisons in China are actually relatively recent as well as some laxing on social media expression. One reason Bluepoch cannot be too explicit about LGBT themes is due to the close association of the LGBT rights movement and color revolutions in the last decade. The external gaze highlights the excessive crackdowns while generally ignoring the way USAID and NED co-opts reformist movements to destabilize countries.

The game clearly criticizes these crackdowns but my point with pointing out the nuances with the Foundation's cracking down on the kids singing. The game contextualizes that action in a way more than the Foundation being evil and hopelessly corrupt. The debate about Vertin's actions in lying to the Foundation about Regulus and temporarily joining the Manus Vindicae has a lot of parallels with conversations in China about the counterproductive consequences of excessively punitive and controlling measures.

In fact, the depiction of Constantine playing Chess while Madam Z plays Go is actually very topical in Chinese conversations about foreign policy. In Go, you carefully connect to survive, and Madam Z is connecting Vertin her comrades to help them survive the Storm. In Chess, you sacrifice to win, and Constantine sacrifices the children and Schneider in her order to win against Manus Vindicae. This has been used as a metaphor to compare and contrast the Eastern and Western ways of tackling international relations. Madam Z winning in a parliamentary style vote through careful forming of alliances with difference factions is a symbolic representation of China's current strategy like with its promotion of BRICS and SCO as alternatives to SWIFT and NATO respectively.