That's one of the many core dangers of disrespecting free speech for the sake of prohibiting "hate speech". It's a very, very short step for a government to persecute criticism of themselves on the basis of "hate speech".
That doesn’t make any sense. An opinion cannot be hate speech, that’s a categorization error and not at all how hate speech works.
It’s the other way around: an expressed hateful opinion may be considered hate speech by the law or someone. And an opinion may be considered hateful. But the other way doesn’t make any sense.
"All <n-word>s need to go back to Africa." (clearly and overly hateful)
"All black people need to go back to Africa." (still hateful)
"All African-Americans need to go back to Africa." (All words are accepted, but the notion is still rather hateful)
No matter what words one uses it could be considered hate speech by today's definition. Disclaimer: I do not nor do I advocate using racial slurs, the stub in here was just to prove a point.
There's no "legal" definition of hate speech according to the US federal government, but the most accepted that I've found is "any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons".
Another one: "I hate onions". Now, replace onions with a derogatory name for another group. We can't prohibit negative words on account they can be used to express negative opinions about other groups of humans.
In the case of communist bandits, it's a criticism of a political ideology, and in particular here one party. Criticism of political parties and ideologies is completely fine, even when expressing insults to them. Expressing threats of violence or other crimes isn't permitted or moral, but expressing dislike or disrespect is perfectly valid. Can anyone say they've never expressed disrespect to any ideology or political party in their life?
No, "communist bandits" obviously refers to a group of people, not ideology. Furthermore, while you could argue it's about some particular organisation, it's often being used to refer to chinese citizens in general.
Is the word "fascism" used to refer to current citizens of a particular country, which don't have anything to do with the stuff we hate fascism for? Because the word "communism" is - the comments in question don't attack "communist ideology"; they are derogatory comments aimed at one particular nation.