Incredible how "keeping their people down" means leaps in personal wealth and happiness for huge swathes of the population and internal criticism is that it is a "poverty reduction machine" that is too focused.
They're not mutually exclusive. Lots of terrible and mismanaged governments rely on genius short-term economic exploitation, like Syria, Iran, India, Korea, etc.
What would be incredible is China sticking the landing to a third-sector economy. Plenty of countries have industrialized over the past century, only a handful became true service economies.
If they had a government like Taiwan they would be significantly wealthier. Their government is a drag and should not steal credit from the actual people who made that wealth with their hard work and entrepreneurship.
China's not afraid of a little imperialism, and they'd be wise to embrace more globalism in exchange for better standards of living. If America falls and China refuses to pivot to the service sector, then they'll slide back into only being valued for cheap labor. They have to strengthen their internal financial sector or else someone else will.