State capitalism is the most superior system anyway. Lacks the inherent failures of free trade (i.e. being exploited by billionaire Americans, Indians, and Chinese who ship all your most advanced technology (and educated people!) back to their homelands, never to return), the inherent failures of total command economies (i.e. unpredictability and volatility leading to goods shortages and resource hoarding) and has the independent MIC that growing global empires crave. Or, well, that anyone craves TBH.
The PRC is only pro-free trade these days so it can steal Western (especially American) semiconductor and composites technology, among other things, to improve its military's techno-failures against the Russians (and USians). The fact that the PRC has the largest national market in the world (and a growing middle class) makes the profit motive a perverse incentive in the long run if you consider a national economy to be a political tool, which means that the USA will continue to experience brain drain to burgeoning techno-industrial (i.e. places that both manufacture and invent) economies like PRC and India; mostly because the students of the future will increasingly be Chinese and Indian, taught at American universities, who return to their homelands which have retained a functional industrial base.
In the future, free trade "knowledge economies" like UK and America will experience further de-industrialization, becoming increasingly irrelevant as they cannot make any use of their inventiveness and ingenuity without relying on an outside party like the PRC, Germany, or India. They will become economic backwaters that exist solely to send their best and brightest to advanced civilizations that will accept them (ideally said civilizations don't, since that would mean that those best and brightest might have a chance of rejuvenating their homelands, but they will probably accept them precisely because it will keep the West down).
Much like how Thailand isn't very important to the world despite manufacturing most computer hard disks, Silicon Valley will increasingly become less important to the world despite inventing new transistors, because the United States itself will be unable to manufacture these transistors. Then Silicon Valley will move to Beijing or Shanghai.
Thus, investors and inventors will seek new opportunities in the PRC (or some other place that still makes things, like Germany), which is all according to the CPC's master plan for achieving global hegemony. OTOH, if you have absolutely no national loyalties whatsoever, then free trade probably seems like a good deal no matter how you slice it; which is probably the only reason that anyone supports free trade in the most advanced economies.
Since pretty much everything in the PRC is planned, it's no coincidence that loads of Chinese students want to return to their homelands (or that loads of Chinese investors are rebuilding the occasional research lab or factory in the USA, which will only exist so far as they further the aims of the CPC to steal technology and subvert the Western alliance, and promptly vanish as soon as the PRC's enemies are sufficiently cowed); beyond the obvious dire economic situation the USA is in it's pretty clear that the PRC has an actual future ahead of it. The USA has a slow stagnation, precisely because it never planned how to go about the transition from industrial to "post-industrial".
So something like MITI is very much preferable to free trade, the latter of which seems to be less of a cure and more palliative care for an already ailing economy, while the former seems to be working fine in the PRC, worked fine for the United States in the 19th century, and worked fine for Japan until it stopped doing state capitalism in the 1980s.
While in theory free trade is a two way street, it doesn't seem to be much benefit for the United States, since the PRC simply doesn't view its economy as anything less than a weapon of war to destroy its enemies.
