I agree with your premise, and I believe China is lying, but there’s another factor going on in the US that explains at least why our death rate looks higher. Simply put, we have no idea how many people have been infected with COVID.
The only concrete numbers we have are of people who have tested positive and people who have died while infected with COVID. It’s likely that some of the people who died while infected with COVID were going to die anyway within days or weeks. Would it be accurate to say that someone with emphysema, diabetes and end-stage cancer died from COVID? Regardless, those people are added to the death statistics. It’s fair to assume that when someone dies in a hospital these days, they have either tested positive or barring ambiguity, are assumed to have been infected.
On the infected side, we have reason to believe that the number of people actually infected is likely to be an order of magnitude larger than those who have tested positive.

So we have a more or less accurate numerator, but the denominator is a huge unknown.

If 900,000 instead of 90,000 have actually been infected, then the death rate is 3.7%, not 37%.

In Germany, some testing has shown that upwards of 14% of people there may have already been infected. If just 1% of Americans have been infected (which seems likely) that’s over 3 million infected here. That would reduce the mortality rate to ~1%.

The number of deaths is certainly going to rise, but it seems likely that COVID might just be maybe twice as deadly as flu in a bad year.