The power of a sovereign to directly tax, and indirectly inflate its currency says otherwise.
You also need to quantify what it means for the economy to 'run off state subsidies'. There are particular sectors of the economy that are subsidized in China. The rest stand on their own. Smart subsidies reduce the overall cost to the economy, by building the foundation on which the rest could be built on.
100% of a state's economy obviously can't run off subsidies. But a smaller percentage can - and when invested smartly, grows the rest of the economy. Do you have any numbers for which fields of China's economy depend on these subsidies, and which percentage of those fields those subsidies represent?