China is about to run straight into a population wall, and is a kleptocracy that has funded itself off of the economic boom of transitioning from developing to developed economy - but it never developed the type of institutions to limit corruption which are needed to be a rich, developed economy.

Everything you see with censorship and social credit scores is geared towards one thing: pre-oppress the population to try and not be annihilated when the growth rate slows down to the point the trade off in freedoms is not worth it. The move towards a dictatorship is also a problem since dictatorships generally perform extremely badly economically if they're not resource economies that are independent of the treatment and quality of the labor.