The Soviet Union is since 1922 [1] and basically still exists today under the leadership of Putin. The CCP is since 1921 [2] and is still in power today. Both have 100+ years under their belts.
> Folks here with more experience can describe better than me what actual regime there is, to me it seems like some mixture of brutal capitalism and regulated markets, dictatorship of the elite, all drowning in corruption.
It's what communism always looks like. At some point all systems are setup to incentivize the individual in order to ensure production happens. Over use of socialism almost always results in some percentage of the population choosing to do nothing to support the society they benefit from. It's why ideas like UBI will never work. The only other way to ensure production happens is to use the stick rather than the carrot.
> What labels they put themselves on doesn't really matter, does it.
Almost a "real communism has never been tried!" type argument.
China isn't really a capitalist country. It's more capitalist than it used to be in the 70s, but as this refusing-to-liquidate nonsense shows, the basic rules of capitalism don't really work there. China ignores many things that are required to really do capitalism properly:
- IP rights aren't enforced
- Other kinds of property rights aren't enforced (see the ARM subsidiary that simply declared independence)
- Staying out of private business (see Ant Group)
- Many companies and industries are state owned
- Industrial policy is still the standard in China (compare to the USA)
- Markets aren't informed (rampant censorship, bad data)
and so on.