I don't think you're particularly biased Jones, I tend to find myself almost in agreement with you on many of these topics.
My personal take is that it's best to look at China through the lens of similarity more than the lens of difference, comparing its activities with those of the United States historically and today rather than falling for narratives about exceptionalism and great difference.
Xinjiang for example, as a detention project, per capita relative to China, it's somewhat comparable to the scale of Australia's immigration detention archipelago in recent years. And the repressive techniques used in Xinjiang are half borrowed from the "counterinsurgency" field manual the United States used in Iraq during the "reconstruction" (amazing term), which was itself mostly written by an Australian military intellectual.
Likewise Belt and Road, though it's a vast collection of varying neo-colonial projects, is much smaller than the equivalent western soft power and debt slavery initiatives over the past decades.
I expect nothing special from China but the instruments and techniques it is using are mostly established, normal stuff. There are salient differences, but … its ambitions to build military bases, control its adjacent territories and such certainly aren't among them. Engaging successfully with what China's doing now is going to require western governments to adjust to these positions.
