My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them.
Which is exactly what this issue is about.
That's not to say we have compelling evidence that this was a lab virus, either. I think, for me, it's a, "we don't know, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if it was a lab virus".
So are they or are they not mindless robots? It's not only ignorant but supremely arrogant and condescending to assume the 1.4B can't tell the difference between real and fake news and need to be restricted in what information they can consume. Qubit000 has the same username on reddit and twitter. He posts lots of pro-CCP garbage
It's not about 1.4G people: it's about 7G people... The whole of humanity is suffering because a small vocal minority has been deceived and is causing problems for others.
Before the pandemic, I thought just like you that control of the mass media... Some kind of censorship was incontrovertibly a bad thing
Now I think otherwise: if it allows us to save 2.4M lives (and counting!) I'm ok with censorship, as long as you can still use VPNs, TOR or other ways to circumvent it... And the fines for violating censorship are just little bit more than a slap on the wrists