I probably did not explain enough in my original post. It's not about having an audience even. It's the right to spin up some storage for encrypted data, run an encrypted matrix node for family, use a VPN, have a small blog for people to follow your travels and thousands of other options afforded non-Chinese nationals.

You can't anonymously access information as almost everything is tied to you ID number. You can't buy things, chat, watch TV (smart tvs), or do most anything with any sense of privacy.

Living in China as a Chinese means living with a drastically different mindset when it comes to these sorts of things. It's hard to understand how it changes you unless you've lived there.

This just shows that many of the policies in China are wanted by many, probably the majority, in society there. The policies are not always used for good, but they are indeed used to stop the spread of harmful misinformation or harmful practices (eg. detox via drinking bleach). In the US, you have the right to say something, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to listen to you or have to help spread your message; if you try, you might find a (possibly large) niche that people are interested in such as “the 2020 election was rigged” or “COVID doesn’t exist” or “the moon landing was filmed on a sound stage”, and you won’t be robbed of your autonomy of movement and speech by being sent to jail or a “re-education camp”.