Here's your problem:

Say you find out a fact about China. How do you know if it was true or if someone made it up and is pretending it is true?

We recently saw reports that their Defence Minister has disappeared, and the ministry spokesperson basically said "no comment". If you were a journalist or scholar and thought this was maybe false, wouldn't you have to fly to China to really prove it? And if you flew to China to interfere with what they're trying to say, you might make Xi Jinping very angry, and he is one of Earth's most powerful men. Making him angry would be unwise.

Here in the States it's easy, we are free to question our government, you will not be jailed for asking questions unless you are doing something else illegal at the same time you are asking the questions. Things are not equally easy and free in China. They do not always agree with us on what things in life are important, and what things are unimportant--they have their own ways of living life that are different from ours sometimes.

All of this makes it virtually impossible to get genuinely reliable information about China's system without actually being a powerful member of China's system. So, to answer your question, the information is not accessible to us, and the kinda meh reporting we get is simply the absolute best that we can hope for. Better accuracy is simply unrealistic, since the system is not transparent.

I can talk a bit about the censorship. Censorship can be found in every type of media and has reached extreme levels under Xi.

First, all IPS in China have to block access to a lot of websites that are hosted outside of China. This includes sites like Google, Wikipedia, Netflix, CNN, and GitHub. Basically anything that is even slightly popular and can be used to share information or media. I am not sure if Lemmy is already on that list but if not it will be soon.

You can circumvent this by using VPNs but that's illegal. People usually get away with it unless they actively go against the interests of the Chinese government. So consuming western media generally is fine but getting politically active isn't.

Then there is a more active form of Censorship. There are a few government agencies whose purpose it is to go through all kinds of media and ban/delete anything that doesn't align with the interests of the Chinese government. This is done automatically with stuff like image recognition software, algorithm analyzing texts, and today probably with some kind of "AI". But also done manually by people reading through stuff. All media companies operating in China have to be compliant with this.

So if you use something like WeChat to share to information that's critical of the Chinese government, it simply will get deleted as soon as it's detected. The person who sent it could get into trouble depending on what exactly they tried to share. Anything that's detected by the automated system the other person won't even receive.

Movies, books, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment have to be approved before being released. This is kinda like the age rating agencies in western countries. Just way stricter and mandatory for every kind of publication or media.

An example on how ridiculous the censorship system is: A few years ago the General Manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted "Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong."

This led to China disabling all NBA broadcasts for the rest of the year. The Rockets lost a lot of sponsorship money because of it. China said it will only return the broadcast if he gets fired. They returned earlier though. But a lot of popular people in the NBA spoke out against Morey for tweet, including LeBron James.

China has stopped being communist since the early 90s. The Great Leap forward so utterly destroyed China's economy that it then defected to oligarch-controlled capitalism.

It's difficult, most of what you read in western media is misleading or outright bollocks. Anything that doesn't follow the approved narrative is buried, ignored or branded fake news.

The problem is that just three global news agencies are responsible for the overwhelming majority of global news. Two of them AP and Reuters are American the other, AFP is owned by the French government. Between them these three decide what you see or don't see.

This applies to everywhere the US/Nato doesn't like, not just China