This is just straight up not true. It's all about the attackers aversion to force and end goal. Americans did not want to raze the country, they wanted to take out a small subset of the population which was hard to identify and find, and create a well functioning democracy in its place. In china, if they dont care about killing civilians or about what the land will look like after the war, they can certainly eliminate the uprising very easily. Simply bomb the crap out of the city, invade and shoot anything that moves. An army wins everytime, especially China's.