Americans like to think they are immune to propaganda, or that for some reason other countries produce more of it than they do. What I have observed as someone not living in china or america is that they are roughly on equal footing and produce about as much deceptive trash as any other country, my own included. This means you will have a lot of americans answering your question by saying that america does less surveillance, not understanding after all the years of pledging allegiance to the flag and having armed police in their schools, that they are very very similar to china and it would be naive to assume they are not being watched as much.

It is also unlikely they even know what happens in china to a good extent because china itself is not very communicative; they still report the same covid stats since march, for example, and their government websites are full of broken links. It is hard for me to get accurate info on china even from news sites, I wouldn't trust what most people say.

All that said I think China is worse, but Americans would have you believe the difference is gigantic.