Fusion will face much the same amount of red tape without changes to the law. Doesn't matter that it is safer, it's "nuclear" which is what most laws target.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-set-to-be-first-countr...
And I'd be willing to bet that China won't put up unnecessary barriers.
In one case the US army had people manually lifting control rods on a dead simple reactor, someone messed up and the SL-1 melted down killing 3 people. Dig into thing and you can find well over a dozen reactors that melted down and many others that suffered significant damage from one mistake or another. So, now everyone builds and maintains redundant safety systems, but that simply isn’t free.
It isn’t any one thing keeping costs high. I was personally hopeful the Advanced CANDU reactor would drive down costs by avoiding expensive enrichment, but apparently it was overall more expensive.
PS: Number I saw per pound was between 1/8th and 1/30th the energy. Though that may not be up to date.
There is no physical possibility of Tokamak fusion power being cheaper than the most expensive method in current use anywhere.