There is nothing communist about China anymore. It's a form of centrally lead, totalitarian capitalism. The problem is that it's an authoritarian system that denies all sorts of freedoms, is looking to expand and export its authoritarianism, and to leverage that through influence outside its borders. That's what makes China a threat.

But that's a hard thing to target, because the US does many of the same things.

China even hit Marxist demonstrators at College. Current China, if any, it's something akin to state capitalism. Since Deng Xiaoping they only have a proper socialist village with "old prices". For the rest, China is merging into some national-populism.

Is that not a distinction without a meaningful difference since communism always ends in a centrally lead, totalitarian regime? The Chinese Communist Party merely used a form of state-capitalism to bootstrap it. Xi Jinping believes in Marxism-Leninism. That's not a secret. In 2021, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party declared Xi Jinping Thought "a new breakthrough in the Sinicization of Marxism."

> Xi Jinping believes in Marxism-Leninism

Perhaps, but China does not have any of Marx's empowerment of the working classes. Factory workers work ridiculously long hours for little pay, while their bosses become billionaires. That's not communism. Whatever label they put on it doesn't change what's underneath.

There are myriad "centrally led, totalitarian regimes" which are nothing like each other. Contemporary China is nothing like 1920s Soviet Russia is nothing like Louis XIV's France.