"Red China is gone. It's just China..." Don't be so sure. The Third Reich was going to be around for a thousand years....
He's right, however. The Chinese are far less communist than we are. While I was over there I asked them about welfare, medicine, and social programs. After some polite laughter, I was informed that only in the U.S. would the government spend money on the poor like that.
Autocratic? Despotic? Certainly.
Red? Not in the least.
Only because the flip side to Communism is socialism. The Chinese people are brainwashed by the later. Don't let that one trite answer fool you. Socialism is much more than the iron rice bowl. What Mao and his cronies have done is transform China from the old Confucian society into the modern day socialist police state. This so called "free enterprise" that you see in Shanghai is there only to serve two purposes: release the pent up energies of the Chinese people while harnessing it at the same time to maintain and build up the Communist war machine.