Communism has a definition. In the same vein, when someone says “democracy,” you can know roughly what they mean without knowing, eg, is it a representative democracy, is it a republic, does everyone vote together on all issues in a town square. Communism has basic characteristics involving the abolition of private property (not the same as property) and class. China has moved away from socialism to a kind of state capitalism over decades, and I don’t remotely understand why we’d call it communist.

Again, if you read Marx he claims that successful communism comes after capitalistic development. The communist party can take communism as an eventual goal instead of as a necessary truth right now, since the latter has always ended in disaster and the former puts off communism until later. The communist party is most definitely focused on communism as a goal, its goal is turn China to communism when its ready, China is not communist ATM.

Yes, that’s why I said at the outset that the CCP doesn’t run a communist country. That’s also a pretty funny idea; the CCP is cultivating a brutal capitalism to encourage a worker revolution into socialism against, uhh, themselves? By this logic the US is communist.