China is engaged in a project to figure out exactly how little freedom is necessary to keep a market economy fully functional. They do allow quite a lot of freedom in the economic sphere and in the chaotic, seemingly lawless, no rules of the road way the Chinese are allowed to drive electric scooters (think "green" Vespa, not kids' toy), but only in areas that the Party regards as irrelevant to its control. The intrusiveness of Party and State are not really 1984-like, not because the Party wouldn't be happy to run things that way, but because the Party has decided that running things that way is not optimal for their own power.