Say you find out a fact about China. How do you know if it was true or if someone made it up and is pretending it is true?
We recently saw reports that their Defence Minister has disappeared, and the ministry spokesperson basically said “no comment”. If you were a journalist or scholar and thought this was maybe false, wouldn’t you have to fly to China to really prove it? And if you flew to China to interfere with what they’re trying to say, you might make Xi Jinping very angry, and he is one of Earth’s most powerful men. Making him angry would be unwise.
Here in the States it’s easy, we are free to question our government, you will not be jailed for asking questions unless you are doing something else illegal at the same time you are asking the questions. Things are not equally easy and free in China. They do not always agree with us on what things in life are important, and what things are unimportant–they have their own ways of living life that are different from ours sometimes.
All of this makes it virtually impossible to get genuinely reliable information about China’s system without actually being a powerful member of China’s system. So, to answer your question, the information is not accessible to us, and the kinda meh reporting we get is simply the absolute best that we can hope for. Better accuracy is simply unrealistic, since the system is not transparent.