I think individual experience is going to vary depending on how much you are trusted. SerpentZa was a vlogger who was there in China for a long time. In contrast to your example, he has mentioned about being stopped at various places and CCP trying to honeytrap him. Even though his wife is Chinese, he moved out of China eventually[1]
But I would agree to the sentiment that American/European media might not be giving the complete picture. If you read local sources or wire feeds you will realize the partisan reporting they do. This is not just true for China, take one more big Asian country India, it has a lot of English media press, you can see the bias easily in reporting of even big names like NyTimes, Guardian. They like to report on mostly negative stuff, skipping reports which connect events as well, so you might end up with a perspective that things are worse than they might be. I can link reports to show how coverage gets omitted from even wire feeds but that is offtopic.
But I would agree to the sentiment that American/European media might not be giving the complete picture. If you read local sources or wire feeds you will realize the partisan reporting they do. This is not just true for China, take one more big Asian country India, it has a lot of English media press, you can see the bias easily in reporting of even big names like NyTimes, Guardian. They like to report on mostly negative stuff, skipping reports which connect events as well, so you might end up with a perspective that things are worse than they might be. I can link reports to show how coverage gets omitted from even wire feeds but that is offtopic.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWgqdfAomVI