It is really rather silly to call the present Chinese system communism. To be sure, that’s what they still call it, but names don’t make it so. All those Democratic Peoples Republics were none of those things.
Any system with many aspects of a free market economy, not to mention private property millionaires and billionaires, isn’t communist in any logical sense of the term.
Totalitarian, fascist, statist, murderous, oppressive, kleptocratic, and lots of other negative adjectives. But not communist.
It’s actually much closer to the traditional Chinese system of control by the mandarins, with scholar-officials replaced by Party members. And now with Mao gone they don’t really have the equivalent of an Emperor, so the mandarins are running a collective system of control. This never worked before in 2000+ years of Chinese history. An Emperor was needed to keep the mandarins’ corruption from getting completely out of control, which is what I suspect will happen.
North Korea, with its 3rd-generation hereditary God-King, is even farther from communism.
Excuse me...
That is precisely what makes China communist.
When all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating dictatorship by very definition makes China Communist.
>Any system with many aspects of a free market economy,
The Chinese basically adopted those aspects as a means to an end. Take a look at the current constitution of Communist China to see what they’re really about.
http://english.people.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html
Such as Articles 1-7, 15-24.
Red China is of course still a one-party state. Over there, what the government gives, the government can take away, should they feel like it.
Even the USSR had millionaires.
If you’re looking for a “true communist country”, then you are looking for a pipe dream. The Manifesto goes no further than making the socialist state all-powerful and lying about it “wither(ing) away”. So no need to bother talking about the lie.
If merely having free market aspects to your economy is enough not to be considered communist, then no country in human history ever was communist. Take the Soviet Union (please). They switch from rapid and immediate collectivization to the NEP, which was a free market reform measure, to save themselves from foundering before they really got going. They also never were able to destroy their currency, which had been the plan. Turns out its usefulness wasn’t just “false consciousness.”
That is not to say all totalitarian or nearly so leftist one party states are the same. There is a continuum from Hitler/Mussolini to Pol Pot. China falls well within the communist range, I’d think. Especially given where they came from. Hitler could push his country to the left from the Bismarckian welfare state to naziism and be fascist. You cannot emerge from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution into fascism by letting a few businesses do their thing here and there. That’s just not enough liberalization.