As someone who used to have similar views(Ukraine, xinjiang, etc), the answer lies in Western propaganda. I think it’s because of the the reporting on these issues often includes facts that are deeply woven in to the propaganda, in a way that approaching the subjects the same way you would other news can easily lead you astray. Combine this with the fact that Western audiences are not going to be familiar with the subject matter, materialist analysis becomes actively difficult using strategies that will probably serve you well on other issues.

The way I realized my error is that I pulled a Marxist Descartes, where I did not trust any Us Media sources and rebuild my opinions from scratch using international and academic sources.

For what it’s worth, most threads criticizing China on lemmygrad seldom have liberals interfering. I’m not sure why, but my guess is that threads criticizing China go against the narratives they often use to dismiss leftist ideas.