And US republicans say they believe in freedom above all.

Nonsequitur, of course everyone says they believe in freedom, including you, the difference is whether their actions lead to it, which the Communist Party of China's have done.

I figured it would be this story, I just wanted to make sure it wasn't some other phantasm you'd conjured up. Pornography is illegal in China (as it should be). These women were writing erotic novels that crossed the legal boundary into pornography, however that's judged, and selling them. There is a thriving market for gay erotica that skirts the pornography law, and a thriving scene for 'pornographic' novels that aren't being sold for money, the problem is when you try to secretly sell the latter. As a result, 22 people have been arrested for essentially tax fraud, out of a population of 1,400,000,000.

And why would China be anti-LGBT? Like most of the third world, China has some cultural conservatives with anti-LGBT views, but also like in most of the third world, these were installed by colonizers forcing westernization and Christian morality upon them. China has a long history of LGBT acceptance and even celebration in its pre-modern history, such as the 'passion of the cut sleeve' (go look it up). The crucial difference is that unlike in the western world, they don't have a massive, powerful, fundamentalist religious lobby that can dictate policy and force them back in the wrong direction. The Chinese youth are unsurprisingly more progressive than their elders, so as time goes on attitudes should soften more.

But this brings up another important point: without a state, what are you going to do with all the homophobes? Do you think you could have a peaceful anarchist revolution in the United States and everyone would just stop hating gay and transgender people by themselves? Do you think the reactionaries of the US won't need to be imprisoned until they can be educated into not hating the gays? Do you think you won't need a special body of armed men to forcibly suppress the urge to lynch which lives in the heart of a large fraction of USians? What is the anarchist mechanism for actually transforming the world as it is now, into the world we want it to be, without apparently inconveniencing anyone? You can't answer this of course, because anyone who thinks about it long enough and actually references history becomes a communist.