You should read Populist Authoritarianism by Tang. They explain this better than I ever could.

The tldr however is there is a difference. China is not a dictatorship. I’m not sure why such blatant misinformation is being spread.

What's the practical difference? You get disappeared if you say anything bad about the government. There are no term limits for the head of state. While "dictatorship" is the wrong word, I think people are right to evoke the comparison.

Are you saying an authoritarian government and a dictatorship are the same type of government?

I mean they’re literally different things. You wouldn’t call China a monarchy even though a monarch can do similar things to a dictator, right? If the goal is to say China is bad let’s just say that - let’s not misrepresent their form of government.

I don’t understand the relevance of the lack of term limits. Does not having term limits make a dictatorship?

A dictatorship is a country that is ruled by a single individual (or perhaps a very small clique of people, as in a military junta) where no one else has any effective power to countermand a decree. Monarchies can be dictatorships: there's no effective difference between an absolute monarchy and a dictatorship. In somewhat more informal terms, dictatorships are a form of government where suppression of dissension is a key goal of the regime, in addition to the emphasis on autocratic rule.

Xi Jinping's centralization efforts during his term do strengthen the case for China becoming a dictatorship. The ending of term limits (as it does elsewhere) also likely signals a desire to vest power in the personal authority of the leader and not in a broader political party.

Don't you find the pedantry a bit tiresome? I was curious to see where you were going with your earlier positions, but it now seems that you were just being a contrarian for the sake of some intellectual jousting and that you're now attempting to play on technicalities, but I can't see to what end.

Nobody cares what you call it whether dictatorship, authoritarian or most democratic country ever.

Parent says “you get dissappeared if you say anything about government”. When that is true, we call it dictatorship. Terminology does not matter. We are talking about practical results of it.

So any country that can disappear critics is a dictatorship?

In practice, usually yes. I suppose there are a few counterexamples like Aristotle, though he was disliked for anti-democratic views. But even in the feudal era, kings couldn’t just go murder lords who opposed them. Not without an army.