China is very much communist. It's very different than 19th and 20th century communist state, but the US looks very different than a 19th and 20th century capitalist state.
The Chinese governmental structure is very much communist. The ideals in the propaganda are communist. The goverment has strong control of their citizens, controlling how many children they can have, which city they can live in, etc.
You're looking for the term Totalitarian. All Communists are Totalitarian, not all Totalitarians are Communists. They've long since done away with the pretenses of Communism.
> They've long since done away with the pretenses of Communism.
They've kept all their pretenses of communism.
We aren't a pure capitalist society, or a pure republic, or democracy. We still use those words to describe ourselves. It's important that we do use those words to describe ourselves. The phrase 'all men are created equal' in the declaration of independence aided the abolitionist argument, even if at no point did the goverment treat all men as equal.
The ideals of communism still have an impact on China's goverment, culture and even economy. Just because they fall short of a perfect communist society doesn't mean they are not communist.
Has there ever been a communist country by that strict definition though?
I've always thought communism was just an unachievable ideal. With socialism as the best case implementation of it, and totalitarianism as the worst case.
Kind of like how "free market" is an ideal, but capitalism is generally the implementation.
Hippie communes? Basically communism works great on the small scale when there are no bad actors in the system. It breaks down at larger scales and becomes authoritarianism.
> Do workers own the means of production? No. Are they going toward that? No. It's not "communist" then.
Newsflash: workers never owned the means of production in any communist state. They were told they would, but they were subjected to compulsory work to cater to the communist regime's elite goals while owning nothing at all.
That sort of bait and switch is pretty much the hallmark of every single communist regime since the very beginning.
As far as I know Revolutionary Catalonia came the closest to that.
That said, I don't really care that dictatorships after dictatorships called themselves socialist and communist, people's this and that, they - as good populists always do - subverted the people and their ideas.
Just as North Korea is a "democratic" "republic".
Mistake not this nitpicking for defense of communism. I don't think it makes any economic sense to strip away savings and investment and everything else connected to those for compulsory ownership of your workplace.
So yes, bait and switch is what populism is. And it worked and continues to work wonderfully independent of political leaning/orientation.