Pierre Lemieux writes wisely about China. A slice:
When the Chinese political authorities imitate Western governments’ interventions, they imitate precisely what has, over a century or so, most undermined the rule of law: antitrust laws, attacks on industries that the state doesn’t like (or whose executives it doesn’t like), mercantilism, investment and trade controls, government surveillance, etc. The Chinese privacy laws are meant to constrain independent businesses, not government agencies. China has become a deforming mirror of the West, where the state is using corrupted Western ideals to become a worse Leviathan. It remains to be seen whether the US government and other Western governments, as well as the public, will be repulsed by what they see in the Chinese mirror and will rediscover classical-liberal values, or whether they will be led to look more and more like the deformed image they see in the mirror. Thus far, the latter seems to be happening. Another example: the US government and other governments in the West are expanding industrial policy, which has long been proved inefficient and been gradually (if only formally) abandoned, but is now rekindled for the illusory goal of competing with a planned economy under a tyrannical state.