China is socialist under Primary Stage Socialism with development emphasized. Social safety nets and public infrastructure are not automatically steps towards socialism (in the first place because the U.S. is imperialist and finances these gains with the wealth of other nations with the aim of pacifying conflict rather than ushering in genuine positive change). This spectrum approach ignores political and developmental realities, in the first place with China being a dictatorship of the proletariat and the US being a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and with private businesses subordinated at every step to the popular mass party (and with the final goal of expelling them when socialism is fully developed (1949/1950), since China is a backward nation that did not undergo a capitalist period before developing the DOTP. The “more state or more private” dichotomy is imo an incorrect way of looking at things.

Love the “Orwellian” comparison because it’s such a stretch. Just invoking random names without any need for source material so that anything bad becomes “Orwellian” as westerners can only conceptualize wrong through the writing of that anti-Semitic racist crypto-fascist.