China wasn’t capitalist under Mao.

And yeah that’s kinda my point. You cannot have socialism without a dictatorship. That’s like explicitly in Marx’s writings. The term is dictatorship of the proletariat.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat

It’s a fundamental cornerstone of Marxism. A dictatorship with a monopoly on force is necessary to transition from a capitalist society to a communist society by forcibly seizing the means of production and using force to prevent counterrevolution.

The problem is that once you give that dictatorial power to a state, you can’t get it back.