One of the advantages of an autocracy: you don't need people's approval every 5 years so you can plan for decades. When you're right it is awesome. When you're wrong, well that's what the army is for.

Government ban is part of the reason, but cultural differences are also important. There are other countries where Google is not the defacto search engine: South Korea, Japan, Russia, etc.

Similarly if your were to look into food delivery companies/ridehailing you would also find many countries where Uber has completely failed.

I envy China's ability to not only plan but actually execute plans greater than 4 years. It makes democracies look bad.

Certain fundamental technologies are national security. If you proport to be a superpower you can't have your nation be fully reliant on say the Mac OS. Same with agricultural imports, IC development, dot dot dot

No it's more of the US tolerating asymmetric trade. The whole point of that trade article was that Japan couldn't afford to loose the US market.