Internally Jaing Zemen really opened up China. By letting the Chinese go abroad without minders and experience what the outside world was really like first hand.
I am not claiming he was a Saint (Though his wife regularly attended the patriotic Chinese Catholic Mass) and yes the things you say are true but, under the last part of Deng Xiaoping’s administration and through Jaing Zemen China was becoming a freer place. Hu Jintao reversed that trend. When I was in graduate school in Wuhan we could freely access the international portions of the internet. The professors in the university posted ways to get around the censors (For research purposes you understand) and the instructions were signed by the university bookkeeper (party apparatchik in charge of making sure everything was OK’d by the party.) There was even talk at the time of allowing multiple versions of the party to run against each other (More Capitalist vs Maoist vs Stalinist?) All that stopped with Hu, Jintao.
In some ways though, in my experience, China is at this point freer than the US. They don’t bow to the idol of PC platitudes. You can criticize the government if you are careful and do it right.
I don’t think that China is, in actuality a communist nation anymore despite the rhetoric. The PRC abandoned socialized health care. It has, more-or-less a market economy though highly regulated. It has transitioned into a good old-fashioned Fascist Dictatorship. I’m not sure if that’s better, worse or about the same.
My observations may be, at some level wrong but that is what I saw when I lived in China from 2002 to 2005 and in Hong Kong starting from 1996 until I moved to Guam in 2012.
If the control of the internet is not the most draconian expression of “PC platitudes”, I don’t know what is. That which is not politically correct is certainly censored, and those that use VPNs to get around it are punished. How many political prisoners like that do we have in the USA?
China is most definitely still communist. A “highly regulated” health care system is a socialized one; compare the USA’s Zerocare. Nothing about ostensibly privately-owned businesses goes against either the Communist Manifesto or the Principles of Communism.