Is this "taking Chinese propaganda at face value"?

Well... no, not exactly.

Your approach to helping to see truth through the miasma of the narrative is, as you present it, reasonable if unavoidably inherently biased - independent journalists are largely going to be presenting the western Ukranian perspective, just by dint of volume (nobody puts them in prison just for being critical of the Ukrainan commanders (the nuances of that are a different discussion that is also important).

(I am also (and I want to be clear not in a dismissive way I am just genuinely unclear what you are referring to) very curious as to what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?)

I have done a similar thing, where I have based my opinion on careful research of my own interactions with Ukranians and the work of academics familiar with the situation as well as:

• the documentation from both state and independent news reporting groups inside Ukraine (and to the extent we have them Russia
• the patterns of behavior Russia has historically used to justify their imperialism that are reflected in their current actions
• the truly overwhelming number of reports and analyses from long-established dedicated & well respected international groups who report on this

And that's I suspect what you have done too.

But... when I do the same thing for the claims of genocide in China, I arrive at the conclusion it's very much occurring. There's overwhelming documentation from many many sources on the topic, and much as with the Ukranian conflict, the majority are going to be western aligned simply because (despite the fascist push for control of western media) independent and critical media is not suppressed in the west, but it very much is in china (to any comparable degree) (the list of independent Chinese journalists is longer than in Russia, which tracks it's a much larger country, but their lives are often no less fraught). In different ways than in Russia, but nontheless the narrative is extremely strictly controlled.

Why then do you treat the mountain of inherently biased evidence for Russia being wrong as acceptable and reasonable, but when many of the same organizations you will have used to dismiss Russia's claims say there is a genocide in china, they are dismissable?

Setting aside that a genocide does not have to look like whats happening in palestine (ask me about native american genocides I can go on for a while), it's internally inconsistent reasoning.

My issue is with the authoritarian governments and their tightly held control over their media. Recently I've felt that western news sources have also been very biased and I can't take anything coming from them completely straight. I've even switched sources from legacy media outlets to individual reporters and small boutique media outlets. (YouTubers) They have less ties with the establishment and while they are still biased, they have far more of an objective overview of the situations at hand.

This is different from China and Russia because they control a lot of their social media as well.The great fire wall being infamous. Also the language barrier definitely makes it more difficult to find people organically.

I am also less likely to believe stuff I hear from a country like russia which heavily suppresses freedom of speech and jails protestors as compared to France which doesn't do the same (or at least to that level).

Plus Putin and xi ping openly flaunt being dictators. There's too much smoke to be oblivious to something like this.

Also if you believe these men really care about genocide of their people in any terms other than how it affects their status and power, then you are quite mistaken. Because I can say this with a straight face, that no democratically elected leader/politician cares about such issues without worrying about the same, much less so authoritarian dictators.

You're not categorizing genocides properly

The Uyghurs don't have their own news agencies, and they're not being splattered over the streets like Palestinians

It's a cultural genocide, it was more like what the US did to the natives. Forced education, over surveillance and policing, forced marriages...

They've backed off on it, and it's better than killing people... But it definitely isn't good

I feel like this is why we need to stick with primary sources whenever we are debating with liberals . Liberals don't trust any news source coming from Russia, China etc (which I'd actually say is a rational fear considering there education) but western news sources time and time again have been proven to lie and not base any of there arguments on the truth.

If we want to actually argue points to liberals or other people we need to use primary sources that can't be disbuted by saying "that's Chinese communist propaganda". Although that does represent another problem in that primary sources are usually harder to read, or are very long and most people probably aren't willing to read through it to verify it's authenticity themselves, which does create a vector for misinformation. Although I still think it's better than secondary sources that liberals will just deny.