Pretty sure this guy was claiming to be some sort of anarchist when I first met him. Him ending up shilling for totalitarian state tyranny was probably predictable on some level, but it’s still bleak. 
This is a hair’s breadth from “Mussolini made the trains run on time” stuff. Undoubtedly he’d claim he’s not defending the specific policy of China, merely the idea of “an interventionist state” in principle, but the two things aren’t separable.
“An interventionist state works”. What kind of state? Intervening to do what? Working for who? Doesn’t seem to be working out so well for the Uyghur.
States are instruments of class rule. A state “intervenes” to pursue ends in accordance with the political project of the ruling class. “State intervention” in China might mean new subway lines (built by workers with no right to independent unions, obviously)...
...but it also means ethnic cleansing in East Turkestan, police brutality in Hong Kong, a militarised surveillance regime used to clamp down on dissent, and the obscene enrichment of an oligarchic bureaucracy - for whom “an interventionist state” has “worked” very nicely indeed.
The conclusion is obviously not “state intervention is bad, let the market reign unimpeded”; it’s that without foregrounding class struggle over the character of state intervention, and ultimately without a social revolution to determine the character of the state...
...uncritically cheerleading for “state intervention” makes you, at best, a supporter of top-down statist technocracy, and at worst, an apologist for oppression.
