Reverse Cold War: Communist USA Vs. Capitalist China

I have a idea that, with boatloads of fact-checking and oodles of tweaking, might fit the bill.

I wonder if Peter the Great could "Britainize" Russia circa 1721, as in establish a democratic parliamentary system and provide his people with certain rights and freedoms. Combined with the empire's sheer resources, perhaps this kicks off the Industrial Revolution in Russia as well--and China may very well follow suit, though I don't precisely know how to make the latter the dominant of the two, nor how to make it a nearly anarcho-capitalistic superpower.

British North America (or BNA), meanwhile, remains an English colony under the control of its colonial masters. Whatever industrialization it does undergo ultimately serves the mogul, the noble, or the detached, far-away islands that take the lion's share of BNA's economic productivity. For all their toiling, the colonists seldom receive more than scraps for living under English monopolies that put domestic enterprises out of business, or practical slavery as the workers toil in filthy factories and death-prone mines for the profit of people who often don't live in BNA. Of course, it's only a matter of time before one monumental mistake triggers an American socialist revolution.

I predict that much of why the American colonists revolt while the Asian workers don't (or do so much less often that governments see no need to interfere) will come down to a matter of perspective in this case. Outside of that, the Russians and Chinese--for their almost unfettered laissez-fairism--still enjoy the fact that their industrialization is (mostly) benefiting them, whereas the people of BNA are being plundered and polluted by imperialist overlords. So I suppose it's a game of "hey, could be worse" for those at the bottom rung of industrializing Asia.