Don't forget that China is still catching up. In the 80s, when it started developing, China was poorer than any African country.
The Soviets and Americans also did a lot of borderline and dangerous stuff when doing prestige and science.
Times changes here in the WeSt where safety is first. It will also be in China one day, too.
the difference being that the cold war fueled novel R&D and science that the world had never seen; the Long March is a tool that was created as a means to chase after the capabilities of similar Heavy-Lift style rockets. The experimentation of the Cold War was fairly tightly controlled and limited in quantity; the Long March is supposed to be used for generally all space construction for the foreseeable future.
Given that this class of tool exists in the world already, all we can be asked to do is judge it against its' peers. They all have had accidents, but if the Long March is going to be known for spraying debris across the planet then this is a problem that everyone must pay attention to, regardless of where China has progressed to with regards to their safety culture.
We're not talking about Chinese safety when we're referring to space debris; this encapsulates the entire world.
This seems a bit generous to the US & USSR - remember when we nuked the bikini atoll many times? (oops sorry about your homeland)
John Wayne is possibly one of the victims of this (inconclusive; besides getting nuked he also smoked like a chimney.)
It takes serious internal problems for the third or fourth person following to repeat those mistakes.
It would be correct to suggest equivalence of attitudes while we were nuking Navy sailors and Nevada hundreds of times, to say nothing of willfully infecting citizens with syphilis, etc, etc, etc.
https://www.ctbto.org/specials/testing-times/16-october-1964...
The US is not known for their safety culture, they screw up just as readily as everyone else. They are very well known for minimising its own flaws an throwing a spotlight on its opponents mis-steps. The US inherited the fine British tradition of effective propaganda and do a very good job deploying it (comes with the territory for democracies, really).
Seriously, "they didn't do X..." for a country the size of the US over the length of years we're discussing is meaningless. Proving a negative like that is not practical even in casual conversation.
SUBSAFE?
Someone can convert that to 9's based on fleet deployment time, but that seems like an exemplary 60 year safety record.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_subma...
1. We don't know how the outcomes compare to the Chinese standards or if the difference is significant.
2. The US has a third of a billion people and the largest military budget. China has a billion people and the world's largest military if I recall correctly. There will be pockets of excellence in both. One example isn't anywhere near enough.
3. Before SUBSAFE they had a terrible record of unsafe subs, that is why they bought in the program. That is part of learning and it'll go the same way for the Chinese with their rocket programs - losing these things is expensive and everyone figures that out fairly quickly.