The China duality: It seems that China is a capitalist country when people want to discuss their achievements, and a communist country when they want to discuss their faults.
It is quite clear, however, that most analyses of their economic successes don’t add that nuance and come to the predetermined conclusion that I outlined above: the success is due completely to adopting western capitalism, and the negatives are due to the elements that don’t fit that mold.
Some of the above is “capitalistic” and some of it is not. Commentators have been predicting China would continue to shift towards becoming more capitalist or fail for decades and they’ve been continuously proven wrong. China has developed a completely different model of development from the western consensus, but people still want to have their cake and eat it too.
But yes, I totally agree that you don't need to be 100% capitalist to benefit from having a market economy. Even the US's economy is ~15% public sector. Usually when multiple ideologies are competing, there's elements of truth all around.
They call their country communist because they can't afford to undermine the legacy of the communist party by admitting that they made huge mistakes in the past.
People like to gloss over the more complex reality that is Chinas actual economic structure when it benefits their personal ideological agenda.
Note that my comment doesn’t call that into question though, only that the conversation around chinas success is almost always grossly oversimplified to suit ideological agendas.
To be fair, a fairly big reason why China became poor was because of western imperialism. Look up "Century of humiliation".
And if you go back in history far enough, China was the most advanced country and had the highest GDP in the world for long periods of time.
But I think you're not open to these ideas.
A system with the property rights that exist in China is a long cry from any reasonable definition of capitalism.