It might be an authoritarian one party state but China isn't a dictatorship right?

Technically China is a dictatorship.

The constitution of the People's Republic of China and the CCP constitution state that its form of government is "people's democratic dictatorship".

The current president has done much to make his appointment for life, so it is a dictatorship that is on the road towards having a dictator.

Cue comparisons to what is currently happening in the US.

Yes, 人民民主专政.

A socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.

I think you're ignoring some of the poetic intention of those words, the idea is that the Marxist collective is the dictator. It's turning the concept on its head to put the people at the forefront.

In other contexts such as casual conversation here in the West the term dictatorship means something quite different and you seem to understand that too because you say they're "on the road towards having a dictator" which is surely an admission that they currently do not have a dictator and are ergo but currently a dictatorship.

I'll certainly grant you that Xi has made moves to consolidate power in the individual but that's a separate discussion.

So it is a tyranny of the majority? That's not the vibe I get from China at all.

I wouldn't have said that either, no. What vibes do you get?

That China is a society that strives to control the lives of its subjects in all imaginable ways. It's a totalitarian one-party-dictatorship.

They’ve fallen into the trap Bakunin warned against, that the Party vanguardism and dictatorship of the proletariat model Marx was advocating for would lead to catastrophically authoritarian regimes. Marx eventually had him kicked out of the International. He was saying this around the time Lenin and Stalin were being born.

Can't edit but also just wanted to add this page of Marxist theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...

What is a dictatorship if not what you just described?

Dictatorships have dictators. The power flows from that one person (think Hitler or Stalin), the military is probably loyal to them rather than other state apparatus and there tends to be no codified route to succession in the event of their death.

China is different in all these cases, even after the significant moves by Xi to consolidate power. You could argue that I'm the days of Mao there was a dictatorship in place but things have radically changed since Deng Xiaoping took the helm.

The President of the USA is the commander in chief. The military is loyal to the Commander in Chief until the President changes. What happens when the President never changes. If you want to say “they are actually loyal to the constitution”, if that were the case, they would have mutinied a while ago.

I'm not talking about the USA, and I'm not sure what you're trying to say in context of what I am talking about.