China is also seeing large numbers of people rising from abject poverty to a "western" more affluent lifestyle. I don't think that this is a terribly good yardstick for fairness and freedom in a society.
Communism utterly failed at making China affluent. Free markets succeeded.
If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".
China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in with authoritarian leadership.
Let's not forget, however, that China is far from an "affluent" country. If your definition of affluent is focused on measurements like income and net worth of the population, China as a whole still falls well outside of affluent.
Yes, there's a sliver of population that is wealthy even by international standards, but the bulk of the population has income in the low $100's of dollars per month. That's what enables China to be the factory to the world. Is it going to stay that way? I don't know, but I think the CCP wants to keep it like it is.
Not really. The answer would be "communism with Chinese characteristics". The nuance is in the "Chinese characteristics" part. Whatever that means, but definitely not communism. China or CCP is communism in name only.
No communist system can allow that. Instead, the companies are uniformly state-owned and the rewards added to the state coffers where they will be pillaged and shared by the politically connected.