A lot of eastern Europeans actually miss/look back fondly on the USSR days.... I'm not exactly a fan of them or other "communist" regimes, as they were all basically thinly veiled dictatorships, but standard of living was higher for most of the former block countries.

I really don't get all the china dick riding going on. I gotta think it's driven by bots and Chinese netizens. The west is a little unfair on their views of China, but they grab descenters with secret police and quash any form of opposition to their one party system. People who praise them and act like that's a better system are crazy. Really wish we could build some decent highspeed rail network in America though...