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> Except that that's the conventional journalistic way to refer to leaders who come from the political party with the formal name Communist Party of China

Is it? Picking about a dozen random articles from the NYT "World" section today, I found none that referred to "X's [ideology/party designation] leaders" other than this one.

Though that does not necessarily mean that there's intentional bias from the NYT here - the above selection of articles also avoided an opportunity to do the same for North Korea.

> which declares that China is currently in the stage of "socialism," in Marx's view of history

And this is one of the big issues I have with the constant use of "communist" by the media when referring to these governments and parties, because they pretty much never make the distinction you just did, which is a quite major one.

> Yep, most countries that are ruled by a formal Communist Party have very appealing language in their written constitutions

You can extend that to "most dictatorships" regardless of the name or claims of the ruling party. Very few dictators are prepared to publicly announce they are bad. Many even appears to believe in their own propaganda.

> I'll trust the journalists who are not under direct party control for information about China, thanks.

I'm not sure I'd trust a lot of US press to be entirely objective on China, though, and in particular, when it comes to a different economic strategy than is the norm in the US.

I get my news about China from journalistic sources all over the world (including China's state-controlled press) but especially from the many Chinese people I know, with whom I can converse and correspond in Chinese.

AFTER EDIT: It would be interesting to me and might help me learn something if I heard from a reader about what could be objectionable about this comment, especially because I was responding to another reader's assumption that I only get news from United States sources (which has not been true about news from China, for me, since I began studying Chinese in 1975).

Looks like the US Constitution is becoming more of a propaganda document as we move along the timeline. So I would have to say it's not just a failing of a formal Communist Party, it's a failing of humanity.