I have lived in Beijing for the past four years. When I first got here, China was inching, albeit slowly and awkwardly, toward being something that could almost be mistaken for an almost halfway quasi-semifree country. Then Xi came along, and... may I put a fine point on it?
Immediately it became the case that in China, everyone, be they citizen or foreigner, has exactly ONE right, and no others at all. The reason so many of us come here and stay is because that one right happens to be the one and only right we don't have back in the over-regulated and expensive West, and that is the right to control your own financial future. That is it, and that is all. You do not control what you say, you cannot freely move about, (even less so if you are a citizen, bound inexorably to whatever city your Hukou card is attached to), you cannot even freely access most of the internet without a VPN (which is of questionable legality in its own right), if you're a citizen you have to even obtain a "Family Planning Certificate" before even having a child, and to enforce this, women are required to report their menstrual cycles to the authorities for crying out loud.
And in the classroom, I've seen teachers dragged out in cuffs for even mentioning the South China Sea without using the words "China's Own" in front of it, and a colleague of mine was sentenced to five years for showing a video of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. His arrest was followed by the PSB taking over his former class for a day to explain in no uncertain terms that the video was Western Propaganda made by CGI (because yeah, we had that kind of technology in 1989, yup... sure).
The only right the Chinese authorities will avoid stepping on if they can help it, as I said, is your right to make money, and spend it pretty much however you see fit, as long as it's not sent overseas. If you want to send it abroad, that's when the walls start going up, and the Chinese know a thing or two about walls.

Niccolo Macchiavelli stated "Men will more readily forget the loss of their fathers than their land." I would opine that in this day and age you can replace "land" with "money" and it becomes true, and the CCP has learned that people will tolerate having their rights trampled on as long as they are able to make money in return, and that is one thing that's easy to do in this land of lazily-enforced business regulations. Then again, after taking a good, long hard look at the aftermath of the 19th Conference, I don't see that remaining the case for very long.