However, the implications are still ominous.
I'm curious, how did China develop into such a police state? Anyone able to point me to some reading on the subject?
The key to Communism in the Maoist approach was absolute central control and the sweeping away of all obstacles; if you stood in the way of, objected to, or even were insufficiently enthusiastic about its plans you would be murdered.
Economic control was gradually loosened in the latter half of the 20th century, but political control remains tight.
Even ancient Imperial China was very much like this. To the point where China basically had no such thing as a legal system in the Western sense! The only kind of dispute resolution was mutually-assured destruction via criminal-like prosecution, basically "If I think you've been trying to cheat me out of something, I can get government goons to beat you up, for theft or whatever." And the government goons often beat up both disputants, for good measure. It's surprising that they even managed to build a halfway-functioning society and keep it going for thousands of years, out of such crudities.
It's an alternative civilization!
The last 30 years we've seen it develop at a rate that is obviously impossible given the experience of all other countries. Yet this, very different, country does it.
It's good to have diversity in governance systems and be able to see the different outcomes, even from systems everyone "knows" shouldn't work.
China was one of the poorest countries on earth in the 1980s.