Well, I'm happy to get into more detail as to why I and many others argue that they aren't communist.
From first principles [1] for example, a communist society is one whose:
> socioeconomic order [is] structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state.
To start, I hope we can agree to leave aside American McCarthy-esque definitions of communism, which I will rather glibly but also partially seriously describe as "anything and anyone Americans don't like." If you'd like, I can provide ample examples of American politicians throughout history describing things that are unarguably not communistic, as communist. Good faith means I think we can avoid this.
Ok, so first principles.
1. The PRC doesn't have common ownership of the means of production, nor did it ever. At the start, production was done through enforced labor in camps. There's no common ownership there, merely what I would argue is some kind of serfdom, if not outright slavery. Nowadays, there still is no common ownership, not only because PRC industry isn't very nationalized, and the parts that are couldn't be considered "commonly owned" because the People have very little say in the activities of the government, and those that do have dramatically larger net worths and buying power, which brings me to
2. The PRC has massive income disparity [2], with each income class having very different standards of living and material comfort. Not even housing or food is guaranteed in the PRC. This isn't classless society. It isn't even close.
3. The PRC obviously operates in a moneyed society. They not only print currency, they also operate many international banks. I really can't think of anything more capitalist than a bank :P
4. Though an oft-argued aspect of the first principles of communism (when I looked at this wikipedia page a few days ago, it was written as "sometimes state," and the week before that it was written as it reads now), at the very least one could argue that a totalitarian centralized government with utter control of the currency, speech, media, and general activities of every one of a billion people across several thousand square kilometers, does not satisfy the "lack of state" requirement of communism.
Marxist-Leninists and tankies would at this point say something like "the PRC needs to industrialize before it can achieve Communism" or that they're on the path to communism for some other reason, but I argue that productivity was at a level that could support communism as early as 30 years ago, and furthermore, the PRC has quite obviously no plan for achieving commuism, and Xi Jinping's multiple power-grabbing moves indicate to me that the CCP will never voluntarily rescind power back to the People.
>Marxist-Leninists and tankies would at this point say something like "the PRC needs to industrialize before it can achieve Communism" or that they're on the path to communism for some other reason
I am very much not an expert on this, but would they really? Wouldn't they be on the side that Khrushchev betrayed all that was right and good and so did Deng Xiaoping, so the bad guys won?
I ran across a reddit group once that appeared to consist of unironic, and self-identified "tankies" and I don't recall them discussing China much. They mostly defended Stalin and North Korea.
My impression is that Marx himself did envision communism developing out of industrial capitalism, it seems vaguely plausible to me that someone would consider the US and Europe, and say, clearly, communism must lie on the other side of that sort of capitalism, and we must develop to that point first. But these presumably would not be the "tankies".
My understanding is that the word "tankie" came about as a CCP focused ideology, insomuch as we describe them as people who preferred tank man would have been run over.
From first principles [1] for example, a communist society is one whose:
> socioeconomic order [is] structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state.
To start, I hope we can agree to leave aside American McCarthy-esque definitions of communism, which I will rather glibly but also partially seriously describe as "anything and anyone Americans don't like." If you'd like, I can provide ample examples of American politicians throughout history describing things that are unarguably not communistic, as communist. Good faith means I think we can avoid this.
Ok, so first principles.
1. The PRC doesn't have common ownership of the means of production, nor did it ever. At the start, production was done through enforced labor in camps. There's no common ownership there, merely what I would argue is some kind of serfdom, if not outright slavery. Nowadays, there still is no common ownership, not only because PRC industry isn't very nationalized, and the parts that are couldn't be considered "commonly owned" because the People have very little say in the activities of the government, and those that do have dramatically larger net worths and buying power, which brings me to
2. The PRC has massive income disparity [2], with each income class having very different standards of living and material comfort. Not even housing or food is guaranteed in the PRC. This isn't classless society. It isn't even close.
3. The PRC obviously operates in a moneyed society. They not only print currency, they also operate many international banks. I really can't think of anything more capitalist than a bank :P
4. Though an oft-argued aspect of the first principles of communism (when I looked at this wikipedia page a few days ago, it was written as "sometimes state," and the week before that it was written as it reads now), at the very least one could argue that a totalitarian centralized government with utter control of the currency, speech, media, and general activities of every one of a billion people across several thousand square kilometers, does not satisfy the "lack of state" requirement of communism.
Marxist-Leninists and tankies would at this point say something like "the PRC needs to industrialize before it can achieve Communism" or that they're on the path to communism for some other reason, but I argue that productivity was at a level that could support communism as early as 30 years ago, and furthermore, the PRC has quite obviously no plan for achieving commuism, and Xi Jinping's multiple power-grabbing moves indicate to me that the CCP will never voluntarily rescind power back to the People.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_China