I would rather be spied on and enslaved by a principled one-party state than a corrupt cartel of political parties

There are plenty of small businesses in China.

Britain used to be a nation of shopkeepers, but now it is a nation of welfare claimants.

China is now the workshop of the world and a nation of shopkeepers.

Chinese politicians are not hoping for bribes from big business because they are a one-party state and don't need to fight elections.

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), by Vladimir Lenin

" ... in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to ***bribe native politicians***, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike)."

" ... the structural causes of the reformist failure; that imperialism afforded ‘superprofits’ to the capitalists of the advanced countries and that

...out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their ‘own’ country) it is possible to bribe the labor leaders and the upper stratum of the labor aristocracy.

And that is just what the capitalists of the ‘advanced’ countries are doing: they are bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert."