mentioned that when surveyed, Chinese people rate the level of democracy in their country higher than Americans do for theirs, but with the caveat that they could be under “censorship”

The Parenti quote about an “unfalsifiable orthodoxy” is arguably being too charitable for this. In the scenarios outlined by Parenti, the western chauvinists took empirical facts and then find some mangled logic to make those facts an indictment on their enemies. In this scenario, the facts are simply discarded out of hand for being too inconvenient. Western polling shows just the same type of sentiment among PRC citizens! Does the CPC censorship extend to polls conducted by fucking Harvard? Are they under the thumb of Big Xi?

I’ve seen the chart you mean and it’s honestly just embarrassing to imagine someone teaching a college course sharing what is literally a single rung higher than PragerU shit. It vastly downplays the people killed under Hitler while using fanciful nonsense to tar Mao. Like, there’s uncritically regurgitating disgusting propagandists like Conquest, and then there’s putting up low-effort, trash-tier slopaganda like it’s useful for educating college students.