What the article says is, of course, horrible. But even if you believe it, it is parents who put their kids in conversion camps. The only part where the govt. comes in is with the assertion that some people heading these “schools” are members of the CCP (which has over 90 million members so c’mon). There are two other articles in this series but they are paywalled so can’t talk about them.
Here is a good article covering LGBTQ+ news in China (positives and negatives).
Here is some direct rebuttal by someone more educated.
All this kind of coverage in Western news does is make certain conservative voices within the Global South associate lgbt rights as “western” and hurt marginalized people within.
It makes sense, because in many places in the West, anti-LGBT rhetoric is like a huge and longstanding cultural project. A significant number of Christians believe that if they treat enough gay people with respect, God will get fed up at some point and genocide the entire society. If I was an American evangelical Christian, I would believe that one gay person walking around minding their own business is a greater threat of human misery than infinite Holocausts.
In some other places it might be a lot shallower, like just a vague belief in traditional gender roles and a deference to the word of their geriatric asshole relatives.