The US is an empire comprising the mainland, as well as vassal and occupied states. China has a smaller periphery (Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, HK, etc.)
If you actually wanted to make this comparison, you would need to compare the treatment of people in the USA's occupied territories, such as Iraq or Palestine, to the worst in China, not the worst in China to the worst in the USA, that by default grants a huge arbitrary importance to national borders. (Although the worst within the USA is very bad). China's appalling assimilation of muslims should be criticized, but Americans rarely draw a baseline comparison to how they deal with large muslim populations (invading their countries, murdering their people, drone-bombing weddings, etc.)
Reminds me of a friend who said "Churchill may have been a belligerent racist, but I'd rather have lived under Churchill than under Stalin!". The assumption is that "soviets" lived "under Stalin", but "englishmen" lived "under Churchill". However, it turns out the victims of Irish and Indian human-made famines also lived "under Churchill". He automatically imagines himself as an english citizen, not an indian subject... and it's not clear why?
Or, to put it more simply, if the middle east or historical comparisons don't work for you, you can just look at the Monroe Doctrine that has been openly re-centered thanks to the efforts to realign Venezuela into American consensus.
If you compare all of China to all of the Americas, you get a much better comparable population + land mass, and you can really contrast how the USA treats peripheral regions: blockades, banana republics, coups, black sites, paramilitaries, etc.
Americans will tell themselves "we may be bad but we are better than the enemy" over and over again, and that is what we will eventually study as the core repeated mantra of American propaganda during its waning years.
As corporations grow more and more important (it's getting harder to do things without a credit card, for example), the government isn't the only important factor here. If the government outsources the punishment to corporations, what difference does it make that the government doesn't punish you for calling them incompetent but the corporations will terminate your accounts, cutting you off from much of modern society? You're getting cut off, because you said something.