Well, for a country that doesn't want capital flight, anyway. I mean, you want those capitalist rats to know that they'll go down with the ship, after all.

This isn't driven by Communist ideology; if it were, we'd see a return back to Mao's vaguely Marxist policy, not a continuation of Deng; the Chinese are fine with capitalists.

In almost any category conceivable (police presence on the streets, incarceration weights, bureaucratic oversight), the PRC is significantly more libertarian than the US. It is true that the CIA has invested a tremendous amount of energy and money into political issues designed to delegitimize the CCP -- Tibet, Falun Gong, and Taiwan. Liberalizing speech around these topics would likely be more efficient counterstrategy than the current approach, which is a remnant of an older model of socialist statecraft.

"Any category conceivable" here means "a bunch of categories I cherry-picked."

I can "conceive" of many categories in which the US is less totalitarian: freedom of speech and of the press, judicial independence, not having to show ID to buy train tickets or prepaid SIM cards, freedom of assembly, severity of punishment for minor drug crimes, ...

The US isn't perfect, but let's not exaggerate.

Libertarianism depends on the rule of law. A central party system where the government always has total authority and is exempt from even the rules it sets is kinda the opposite of libertarian.