They're projecting. They're imaging the petty things they'd like to ban to control and humiliate their political opponents and then applying that same deranged behavior to people of an entirely different culture.

In lib world, they would definitely arrest huge swaths of the poeple daily (or at least try to) for frivolous bullshit which is, for some reason, of huge importance to them. The difference is that they think they could actually be effective in doing so and that those primitive Chinese people are just too inherently inept and weak to achieve the desired result.