[WarmWash]

Letting someone do something is different than being unable to stop someone from doing something. Your response even implicitly acknowledges this, but then you seem to miss it.

Its very naive to mistake leniency in Xi's playground with constitutionally protected freedoms. CCP "free enterprise" is just mock free enterprise. Like a teacher letting the kids have fun with the classroom business sim, the teacher is still in God mode, and can still intervene in any way at any point to do whatever they want.

All of China hinges on the whims of one guy. Nothing stops him from deciding that all that private money is actually state money, or that Geely's president needs "time away".

That is why it is all "CCP money and CCP controlled". Don't confuse leniency with autonomy.

[FooBarWidget]

And yet here we are with the US banning anything at will under the guise of national security. I'm not even discussing whether the national security label is legitimate, or whether your "everything is CCP-controlled" framing is legitimate. But you gotta be consistent and also adopt the position that US companies are "US state controlled", and consistently refer to them as such.

Also, I am pretty confused about your larger point. What exactly are you saying? Is it some variant of "only states with constitutionally protected freedoms are good, everything else is evil"? If that's your position, then where do you put the fact that the US bombs foreign countries at will? And that many western countries sponsor the killing of children in Gaza while arresting people who protest against it? We've seen that western democratic countries, and let's assume they're properly democratic domestically (disputed by their own populations, see Democracy Perception Index, but I digress), can be ruthlessly... let's call it "undemocratic"... abroad. Or the fact that ICE and US police officers detain/kill innocent people and are super abusive. This doesn't neatly fit into the simple "free states good unfree states bad" view. So what is your position in the larger context?

You also completely ignore the part where I said properly understanding China is important in order to defeat it. Do you... not wish to defeat China? Are you contend with merely stating that China is bad? Do you not support moving/developing more manufacturing to the west/US? If you want the latter to succeed, don't you need to have a super good understanding of what makes Chinese industrial policy and development successful? Or are you really contend with merely moralizing?