Has there ever been a communist country that lasted 5 minutes without a form of capital?
Was the American economy ever a "free market"?
While I agree that China isn't communist in the term's strictest sense, it ultimately doesn't matter. Systems that can't adapt eventually collapse, which is why no one word can really describe economic systems or their nations. I've been told on HN that what I'm saying is a "no true scotsman" fallacy, yet when people insist that America has "free market capitalism" or that China is communist because CCP has "communist" in the name, they're essentially making an only-true scotsman fallacy.
Personal freedoms aside, it all comes down to is how involved a government is with its private sector how much value it extracts (overtly or covertly). Everything else is fluff. Nobody really cares about personal freedom or "owning the means of production". It's all about the level of centralized control (the input) and where the energy of that system goes (the output). To say that anything is "communist" or "capitalist" is a dismissal of the inevitable nuance.