Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. I don’t know where either road (America’s approach vs China’s) will lead. I do think suppressing desires in a society is likely to lead unhealthy outcomes, but perhaps there’s a balance.

Most countries are "suppressing the desires" for certain drugs and gambling, some even for sugary softdrinks. These don't necessarily lead to unhealthy outcomes. The easiest cases are where people simply do less of the bad thing without turning to crime, like with softdrinks. Engagement-bait minidramas seem to be such a case.

I am skeptical that suppressing the public display of unwanted (by the government) behavior has any positive effects on the prevalence of unwanted behavior, but I'm pretty sure it produces a better media environment, even if the censorship prevents or mangles some valuable works. While all media has the problem of hyper-optimizing for engagement and addictiveness with lots of copy-catting and sameness, forcing genre churn and giving some artificial incentive for creators to explore new ideas and different forms of expression has been successful IMO. Every crackdown seems to produce a new burst of attempts to find a new pattern, producing more varied stories. I'm don't know about the long-term sustainability of the model, but it seems to be working for now. Western/capitalist-country media, liberated from most censorship through internet distribution and increasing liberalization, has been stagnant and largely uninteresting for years, even as the number of media companies has increased rapidly.