Alright, may I ask if you’d trust a poll of North Koreans to be truthful?

That depends on how the hypothetical poll is done. The think that if these particular, multiple, non-hypothetical polls of China by Western organizations that Hikle referred to say that Chinese people feel that their government is working for them, is improving their material conditions. and that their voices are being heard, that is reliable.

I’ve already asked another commenter this but it’s valid here too: Would you class the western oppression of dissent to be on the same level as that famous student protest in China?

Only someone misinformed about the 1989 protest and US/CIA/NED-orchestrated, murderously violent riot would ask this, which to be fair is 99% of Westerners.

• 📺 The Tiananmen Square “Massacre” Never Happened: part 1, part 2, part 3 — [Sources]
  • Edit to add: YouTube took the original video down for “violating YouTube’s terms of service,” but I found a reploaded a copy, splitting it up into three pieces. This is why you don’t know what really happened, because Western corporate media don’t want you to know. They were reuploaded just today; who knows how long they’ll stay up.
• The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
• CBS, 1989: There Was No “Tiananmen Square Massacre”
• Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
• Tank Man video footage. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989
• How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square: a warning
• 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots
• A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
• Washington Post, 1989: Rebel Without a Magazine

  [Chinese Intellectual’s founder] Liang [Heng] had come from his New York office, where he serves as the magazine’s foreign editor, to Washington Thursday and Friday to address the board of directors at the National Endowment for Democracy – a substantial financial backer of the magazine – to tell it what he knows, what he thinks and what will possibly happen. After his arrival in the United States, he earned his master’s degree in literature from Columbia University and secured an initial $200,000 grant from the NED, a private corporation created in 1983 to “strengthen democratic efforts worldwide,” to start his magazine.

• The Seattle Times, 2011: Quiet scholar who inspired uprisings

  That is not to say [Gene] Sharp has not seen any action. In 1989, he jetted off to China to witness the uprising in Tiananmen Square. In the early 1990s, he sneaked into a Myanmar rebel camp at the invitation of Robert Helvey, a retired Army colonel who advised the opposition there. They met when Helvey was on a fellowship at Harvard; the military man thought the professor had ideas that could avoid war.

• The blueprint of regime change operations - How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent