I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s offensive, but I can agree it’s disrespectful. Respect is shown by the lengths someone goes through to demonstrate someone/ something is important and held in high regard.

Examples:

When you are talking to someone you respect, you demonstrate it by making a point to convey that you are listening to them and thinking about what they are saying.

When a tragedy happens, we often show respect by holding a moment of silence where we interrupt whatever we are doing to hold a moment to think about the victims.

Similarly, a traditional way of demonstrating respect for people’s contributions in a given field is through an awards ceremony where attendees both given their attention and dress in formal attire to mark the significance and importance of the event.

I think you are wrong about how off-putting your tears are.

In my experience, when someone loses someone they care about, it is comforting for them for other people to be sad and feel the loss as well. I think that if instead of focusing on your own tears and your embarrassment when you get emotional, if you still focused on the other person while you were crying, they wouldn’t feel obligated to comfort you. Then they could just continue to share with you and be comforted by the fact that you empathized and were moved.

When my brother and SiL had a stillborn baby, I went to visit them. They genuinely seemed somewhat relieved to see me crying while we visited together.

Maybe they thought it was like throwing a smoke bomb, and they could ghost while it clears.

I don’t see why we have to contrast the US and China so that one is a good guy and one is a bad guy. Has the US exploited the rest of the world since WWII for our own financial interests? Yes. Do we have an increasingly authoritarian government seeking to eventually crush internal dissent? Yes.

None of that makes China good.

If you don’t want to talk about Tiananmen Square, talk about China forcefully relocated migrant workers ahead of the Olympics in 2008. Talk about China sending Uyghurs to reeducation camps and forcefully sterilizing some of them. Talk about how China forced women to abandon/ abort babies for 30 years throughout vast swaths of their country. Talk about how people residing in China can’t actually talk about any of these things, to the point where citizens of Hong Kong fought back with violent protests and many fled to resist their encroaching authoritarian hand.

Did China raise more than a billion people out of brutal poverty in a single generation, and was it one of the most impressive and important developments of the last century? Yes, absolutely. Is an authoritarian technocracy better able to deal with the issues facing humanity in the near future like climate change? Potentially.

That doesn’t mean China’s citizens enjoy civil liberties.