The difference is that in the US all of this is due to incompetence, but given the nature of our laws and society people are free to point out the shortcomings of the response.

In China you are publicly admonished and/or disappeared for going against the official government narrative. That is a stark difference between not just Western/Chinese government, but culture, and cannot be underestimated. It leads to a totally different society and hopefully because of freedom of speech people will be more likely to take protective measures sooner as they realize that the government is responding poorly.

Also you're much less likely to keep the majority of the population ignorant of an outbreak when you don't have a legal and judicial speech suppression machine. Yes, their authoritarian measures were effective in containing the spread (allegedly, all sources afaik from China have gone silent), but they did spend at least a month hiding the outbreak and keeping people from talking about it, for reasons I won't go into.

Not all governments are created equal. Not all cultures are the same. That's pure fantasy brought about by decades of indoctrination in the west.

Note that this isn't just blind nationalism. I fully recognize that under these circumstances the extreme authoritarianism in China may prove to be the best containment measure out of any other country short of North Korea. Good luck convincing 360MM Americans to stay home for a month.