My wife doesn’t even work full time and can afford to live in the city center of her 20 million person city. Lots of people work a lot in many places, I work full time making 4x min wage and can’t afford to rent a one bedroom apartment. My boss works 60 hours a week, and in fact, most restaurant workers here work 50+ hours a week. She’s working as we speak, and making triple overtime. Food, shelter, healthcare, and medicine are so cheap and accessible there that I literally cried the first time I went and realized how shit the US is in comparison. Riding the subway cost me ¥2, less than 1/10 the cost of one hour of minimum wage work. Even getting premade food delivered there is cheaper than going to the grocery store to make your own food in most western places.

On your other point, one of my closest friends there is a vocal critic of the Chinese government, he’s never been arrested, or even talked to by the government. Their prison population is far too low for such things to be true. Their police kill an average of 2 people a year in a country of 1.4 billion.

Can you imagine why capitalist states would have an incentive to trash talk China? Why they would be lying about a country that’s safer, cheaper, and produces the majority of the world’s goods while providing cheap, and easy to access housing and amenities?

Genuinely, go visit China. Spend some time there, it’s safe as hell, the food is amazing, the people are kind and helpful.