Nobody thinks that Russia is communist. However, whatever you want to call China, it's objectively better than what we have in the west. One thing to note though is that 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the Communist party has 95 million members.

China lifted 800 million out of poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:

If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.

The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.

China also massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, they built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade.

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.

Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it's the most populous country on the planet. People in China also enjoy high social mobility.

Unsurprisingly, government satisfaction in China is extremely high and unmatched by any western democracy:

• https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
• https://ash.harvard.edu/publications/understanding-ccp-resilience-surveying-chinese-public-opinion-through-time

Numerous studies and surveys also show that people who actually live in China feel their country is democratic in a sense of having a government that works in the interest of the majority. In fact, far higher percentage of people living in China feel their system is democratic than those living in US

• https://latana.com/democracy-perception-index/
• https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree

Finally, China is the only major country that's actually doing anything meaningful to transition off fossil fuels. Once again, making absolutely stunning progress this year alone.

So, yeah, China might not be an utopia, and they have plenty of problems. However, it is a country where life continues to improve with each and every decade, that doesn't suffer from constant economic crashes the way capitalist shitholes do, and where people are happy and optimistic about the future. Seems like looking at what China is doing and learning from that might be a good start for people in the west.

It’s also fascinating to me how the same people who like to do purity tests for China claiming they’re not actually communist are also the ones who’ll defend places like US or Canada saying yeah it’s not perfect, but it’s the ideal of the system that matters.

It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. People able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.