This is not an attempt to suggest China's government is good, because it's not, but it's also not a carbon copy of the worst sides of the Soviet Union - for all of Deng's brutal authoritarianism, he did recognise and address a lot of the worst mistakes of Mao and the Soviets in terms of the economy.
It also still doesn't necessarily mean employees in a private company in China will be as open to reporting issues as they might have been elsewhere, but it does mean there are incentives in play that at least make many executives want to put effort into identifying and addressing issues.
I lived for a few years behind the iron curtain, in an actual honest to god dictatorship. The fear pervading and perverting society was palpable. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and you might die, and your family will suffer too. Not to mention destroying your career and social status. Best to lie most of the time, even to realtives. You never know who to trust, and the price of a mistake is enormous.
From the way you phrased your question, I get the feeling you have no idea what a dictatorship is like. The two are only very superficially similar. Look at how Navalny ended up vs Ilya Sutskever.
It doesn't even have to be something as advanced as semiconductors, duplicating a line that manufactures something as prosaic as paint is an exercise in patience and frustration. It's like building software from source using documentation, you may think you wrote down all the steps, but you find all the crap you missed when you actually try to execute the task.
2) Top-down command is anathema to engineering progress
American corporations are bad enough for only reporting good news up the chain (see: Intel and deep UV lithography). A dictatorship like China is going to be ridiculous. You will deliver good news to Dear Leader, and you will deliver it when expected, or you will find yourself in the doghouse. So, especially if your task fails, you will make bloody sure that it either gets reported as successful or that you leave someone else hanging with the consequences (see: China and water and rocket fuel). This slows the engineering process to a crawl as nobody can trust anything delivered from anybody else.