The rare-earth export restrictions have little if anything to do with Xi or with whether China evolves towards more freedom or more autocracy.

The export restrictions were not initiated by China, but they were an extremely moderate response to the US "sanctions" that blocked the sales to China of modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment, in order to eliminate the competition and to increase the prices in the DRAM and SSDs markets.

These US "sanctions", which were intended to preserve the monopoly of Micron et al., were the precondition that allowed the huge increase in the prices of memory products when the AI companies grabbed a large part of the production.

In my opinion, China has chosen extreme restraint in their response to the "sanctions" initiated by USA, presumably because they think that they would lose too much if cutting all the commerce with USA.

For me, I would have considered an unacceptable insult when another country declares that they want my country to remain a country that is technologically inferior and they would do anything to achieve this, notwithstanding anything of what they may have said and promised in the past. I certainly would not have wanted any further relations with such a country.