The online shop thing is just usual YouTube sponsor stuff (though it’s more self-promotion since he runs the store, it’s some charity thing), and he sometimes plays Connections at the end of vlog videos like this.

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The PRC does employ censorship, but this is directed against that which undermines socialist construction, including liberal and pro-capitalist narratives.

So in other words not everybody in China can freely express their opinion on political and social topics. Glad we agree on this objective fact. Now what, except for people not answering polls honestly and/or being brainwashed, explains 86% of Chinese respondents responding that China has freedom of speech on political and social topics?

Not all states commit genocide forced re-education or run a draconian nation-wide internet censorship program.

In fact the latter point is a pretty good example of how these polls you’re using as a source are not reliable. The substack article you link says that

When given the statement “Everyone in my country can freely express their opinion on political and social topics”, only 18% of people in China disagreed (compared to 27% in the US).

China doing heavy censorship of public discourse is objective reality – a few years ago they heavily suppressed the social media trend of “laying flat” for example, because they were afraid of the public questioning the rat race.

It’s a well known phenomenon that people raised under authoritarian systems with heavy thoughts control will frequently answer the “socially acceptable” thing even on anonymous polls – this is what the state has trained them from birth to do. Another effect that explains the incongruity in e.g. a larger proportion of Chinese respondents thinking their system is democratic than French respondents is that words like democracy do not mean the same thing in China as they do in France.

dissidents in China are fighting against socialism.

Or just authoritarianism and all that entails.