I do agree that we could learn from China, but there's also a damn good reason why their phones are banned in multiple countries.

Yes, because the US started a trade war with them because they can't compete (in EVs also), and a few of their vassal states followed suit.

Considering that China is known for its heavy censorship and is in good cahoots with Russia

Sources on this? The PRC only blocks western surveillance platforms because they're incredibly dangerous to let them loose in your country. They're one of the few countries not naive enough to let facebook and google take over their social media landscape.

https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/socialism_faq.md#what-about-the-tiananmen-square-massacre

Selling products is not capitalism by itself. Capitalism is a system where private ownership is the principal aspect, and capitalists control the state. Socialism, on the other hand, is a system where public ownership is principal, and the working classes control the state. The backbone and commanding heights of China's economy are publicly owned, and the working classes control the state, ergo it is socialist.

Billionaires exist because private property exists, and private property exists because it speeds up development and integrates China with the global economy. This is a tradeoff used to build up the productive forces as quickly as possible, so that the social surplus can be redirected to developing underdeveloped regions, and because developed industry is easier to publicly own and plan. As these private firms grow, they are more tightly controlled and/or folded into the public sector.

Average working hours in China are 46 hours per week, not 75.

In china, the state controls capital. In America, capital controls the state

I wrote a more direct reply to this, but I have come to realise that in this situation it would most likely be unproductive. You appear to be a very new leftist of some description: you seem to like the idea of socialism or communism, but you do not yet seem to have a firm grasp of what they actually entail. So instead of arguing point by point, I am going to explain what socialism is, why China has been socialist since 1949, and then add some book and article recommendations so you can begin studying the question more seriously on your own.

To start, we have to define a term that is commonly used but rarely properly understood: the state. Many people use “the state” and “the government” interchangeably, but this is not accurate. The state is specifically the organised force by which class antagonisms are mediated through the rule of one class over others. The government, on the other hand, broadly refers to the administration, coordination, planning, record-keeping, infrastructure management, public decision-making, and the organisation of social production required by advanced societies. This distinction will be important later.

Next, it is important to define socialism. Socialism is the transitionary period between capitalism and communism. It still contains many contradictions inherited from capitalism: classes, class struggle, uneven development, commodity production, wages, bureaucracy, ideological struggle, and often limited market mechanisms. Socialism is not “when everything is already communist.” It is the period in which the proletariat holds political power and uses that power to transform society, develop the productive forces, suppress reaction, and gradually overcome the material basis of class society.

This stands in contrast to communism, where class society has been abolished as a meaningful social reality. Communism is classless because there are no longer opposed classes standing in antagonistic relation to one another (as only a single class, the proletariat, remain after the other classes have been proletarianised during the socialist period). It is stateless because, once class antagonisms have disappeared, the state as an instrument of class rule no longer has a function and withers away. This of course does not mean that organisation, administration, planning, or collective decision-making (the government) disappear. It means that the coercive state as an instrument of class domination disappears.

At this point you might ask: if contradictions remain under socialism, how is it different from capitalism? That is a reasonable question. The answer rests on one primary and one secondary characteristic.

The primary question is: which class commands the state? Under socialism, the proletariat commands the state through the people’s democratic dictatorship, also called the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie commands the state, which communists refer to as the dictatorship of capital (even if they have a liberal democratic cascade).

The secondary question is: which mode of ownership holds primacy, public ownership or private ownership? This is secondary because public ownership under the dictatorship of capital functions as state capitalism, while public ownership under the dictatorship of the proletariat is part of socialist construction. Ownership forms matter, but they cannot be separated from the class character of political power.

Now, with this groundwork laid, we can finally look properly at the Chinese situation.

China has been socialist since October 1, 1949, because the old landlord-bureaucrat-comprador state was destroyed and replaced by a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class through the Communist Party. The Communist Party of China has more than 100 million members as of the end of 2024 (slightly over 1/14 people). The commanding heights of the economy were brought under public ownership and workers state direction. The new state was built to suppress reaction, defend sovereignty, develop the productive forces, and transform society.

In China, the bourgeoisie still exists, but it does not rule as a class. Capitalists can own firms in non-commanding sectors, make profits, and accumulate wealth within limits, because developing the productive forces still serves necessary social goals at China’s current stage of development. But they do not command the state, the army, the land system, the central banking system, or the strategic direction of the economy. They do not stand above the people or above the people's organised political instrument, the Communist Party, as a sovereign power.

When capital conflicts with the long-term interests of socialist construction, it is disciplined, subordinated, investigated, broken up, fined, or otherwise brought to heel. Jack Ma and Ant Group is a useful example: its $37 billion IPO was suspended in 2020 and Jack Ma was made step away from public life as he attempted to put his profit before the benefits of the people by pushing for loosening banking regulations so he could provide micro loans. Foreign capitalists spent years crying about this as it showed the truth capital holds no power in China.

To put it briefly: China is socialist because the proletarian-led state holds political power, commands the strategic economy, subordinates capital to national and social development, suppresses reactionary threats, and continues the long transition out of capitalism under conditions of imperialist encirclement, uneven development, and a still-existing world capitalist system.

It would also be remiss not to mention that much of what you “know” about China has been manufactured through a mix of exaggeration, selective framing, omission, and outright lies. For example, you have likely heard about “996” as if it represents Chinese labour law or the normal working life of the whole country. In reality, 996 was an issue in ~40 of the large tech firms around the 2019 tech boom and was quickly ruled illegal which it now has been for half a decade.

For a proper explanation on how this kind of ideological manufacture happens, I would recommend reading Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality.

Further reading recommendations:

I have to a plug @Cowbee@lemmy.ml and their beginner reading list

But for my recommendations more directly related to the topic at hand I would recommend:

• Engels: The Principles of Communism
• Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto
• Engels: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
• Marx: Wage Labour and Capital
• Marx: Value, Price and Profit
• Marx: Critique of the Gotha Programme
• Lenin: The State and Revolution
• Lenin: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
• Lenin: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
• Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
• Stalin: Foundations of Leninism
• Stalin: Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
• Mao Zedong: On Practice
• Mao Zedong: On Contradiction
• Mao Zedong: On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
• Mao Zedong: On New Democracy
• Mao Zedong: Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan
• Mao Zedong: On Protracted War
• Deng Xiaoping: Build Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
• Deng Xiaoping: We Must Follow Our Own Road in Economic Development
• Xi Jinping: Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
• Xi Jinping: The Governance of China
• Roland Boer: Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
• Rong Zhaozi: Productivity, Public Capital, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
• Carlos Martinez: The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century
• Roderic Day: China Has Billionaires
• Michael Parenti: Blackshirts and Reds
• Michael Parenti: Inventing Reality
• Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
• Kwame Nkrumah: Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism
• Vijay Prashad: Washington Bullets
• J. Sakai: Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat

I understand having such a long list dumped on you is likely off-putting however that's the unfortunate truth of being a real socialist/communist, constant reading, education and investigation is a must. If you have any specific questions on any of them I can try help you if need be.