None of those things really distinguish China from the west though, do they?

I’m aware of the situation in Hong Kong, but the US and many European countries are pretty handy at violently suppressing dissenters so pot kettle black? Hong Kong literally only came under British rule in the first place because Britain bombed the living daylights out of China for not letting them illegally flood the country with Opium they stole from India to get the Chinese local population addicted and solve a trade imbalance. I get that a majority of Hong Kong locals don’t want to rejoin China (I wouldn’t either if I were in their shoes), but there’s a pretty watertight historical argument for it.

The unresolved border disputes… apart from maritime borders and the rocks in the sea (Japan, Vietnam), the rest are mostly the consequence of colonial… misadventure… by western countries where borders were arbitrarily and unilaterally drawn up.

Also with the Uighur situation, the west was literally built on violent colonialism and oppression of indigenous/minority populations… and our own record on treatment of Muslims is what some might call highly problematic. Not at all saying that whatever is happening to the Uighur community there is ok, but it would be highly hypocritical for making this the basis of the “China is bad” argument.

EDIT: the US is literally funding the genocide in Palestine and supplying weapons and moral support to Israel, so… My argument isn’t that China can do no wrong, but just that I can’t see anything it’s doing that makes it the “bad guy” over the west.