DEBOONKED

I'll try to explain, maybe someone more knowledgable will correct me if I'm inaccurate.

China is a giant ass country that just started industrialising a few decades ago. The images you usually see of the country are from the coastal cities, where the special economic zones are located and foreign investments were flowing. The development of central and western China is still lagging behind in comparison, The CPC built a giant railways network to speedup the process but there is still a lot to do, and there are still entire cities being built up across the country.

I like this video as an example of what this process of industrialisation looks like.

It’s not wrong, most Westerners simply don’t understand enough about China’s economy to make that assessment.

We can roughly divide the post-Mao period into four major periods punctuated by three Hinge Points, each of which constitutes a crisis and an opportunity for economic transition.

Many Marxists in China will tell you that Deng’s reform ended when China entered its first post-Mao economic crisis in 1995-96. The overproduction crisis had resulted in skyrocketing unemployment at a scale never seen before under Mao (between 1998-2003, state-owned enterprises laid off ~28 million employees), CPI shot up to 24.1%, RMB exchange rate fell from 3.5 to 8.8 / USD.

The productive capacity building phase was effective over.

Hinge Point 1: Joining the WTO, 2001

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Hinge Point 2: Global Financial Crisis, 2009

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In the meantime, Xi Jinping became the head of state in 2013 and vowed to return China to its Marxist roots, and began to slowly steer the economic policies away from the neoliberal era of the prior decades. Whether this aspiration can be achieved remains to be seen.

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Hinge Point 3: Trump’s US-China trade war, 2018

Post-2018 era:

The other answer is good, but I'll rework it (maybe it helps maybe not):

(Edit: wow that looks unreadable, sorry, I'm gonna leave it though, good luck to anyone who attempts to read it)

• Recall that barely 100 years ago, China was in a period of history referred to as "the warlord era" (if you aren't familiar, it's basically as bad as it sounds).
• shortly after this they had decades of civil war
• the PRC is established in 1949, finally bringing some stability to the country (regardless of whether one may personally agree with Mao and/or the decisions of his administration)
• there were a lot of growing pains during the Maoist period (to say the least, lots of good things happened, but Mao also fucked up bigly, the details are a separate discussion though).
• by the 1980s, there was more stability, but a shit ton of poverty and a largely agrarian economy. Under the Deng Xiaoping administration, China started to "open up" it's economy as a sort of tactical maneuver. "Opening up" basically refers to privatizing and globalizing their economy (doing more capitalism). While this has weakened the position of the government, by all appearances, they have not allowed capital to become the predominant authority in the country. It is a dangerous game, to play though and a major discussion point in Chinese politics.
• So basicallly, they just got here (to where they are today). As mentioned in the other post, a lot of the development has been unequal, but they are still in the process of overcoming that. It's not like they have been fake socialists doing capitalism for like 150+ years with nothing to show for it.
• One may suggest that Deng and successive CCP leadership fake socialists who actually are secret capitalists who brought in capitalism out of their own self interest and have no intention of further building socialism. I would say it's not that simple cause it's fucking politics. There are literally millions of people involved in the Chinese government, and there are many many liberals l even at the highest levels. They are also opaque compared to the west (not to mention the language barrier), so it's tricky to get a good grasp on their inner workings.
• this comment comes off as an attempt to take part in that discussion, but it's so low effort that it comes off as if ignorant. These processes take decades and even centuries (it's never quite been done before so we aren't even sure how long it's supposed to take). China is in the midst of it right now. They are doing capitalism that is as rough to see as it is anywhere, but they have the power to blunt the exploitation that entails. In some cases they do, and it could be argued that they should do it more, but once again the OP is not taking part in that discussion and is just saying "ur dum".