i never left china in my 30+ years of life and i was basically growing up in the notion of Chinese people being low self esteem and accepting our inferiority compared to westerns. there's historical reasons behind.
now as the rapid growth of the country and people get access to modern lives, nationalism rises significantly among media and as the state is censoring everything that's not abiding the narrative of nation pride, it's shifting to another end of the balance. and overall, as you can probably observe, nationalism is dominating the world especially the US and China and many.

back to freedom of speech, Chinese people are basically introvert and terrible at public expressing, this character was shaped by thousands years of Confucianism and monarchy, people are not used to intellectual debate and rhetoric like what westerns have been educated since ancient Greek. but if we zoom out to human nature, people are not stupid, people always get their voices out and heard maybe not in a Socrates way, but in a more intangible and less dramatic way, and they will do anything to achieve it anyway, that's the resilience of introverted people. Well on the other hand people are always like The Crowd with their collective limits for sure.
So yeah, if I'm not an engineer I'd put it more in a anthropological way.
gm btw