I don't know that I can agree with this analysis. For starters, the universally-acknowledged start of modern Chinese market reforms was Deng Xiaoping in '82 - "it does not matter if the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice." Likewise, the "new era" is usually tied to Xi's anti-corruption campaign of 2012. These two endpoints reflect the typical Chinese oscillation around central control, where Deng practiced decentralization and Xi practiced centralization.

I just wasted 15 minutes trying to find the title of the Chinese history book that lays out Chinese history from a Chinese perspective for Western eyes. something something disrupted, but not the Tamim Ansary book on the Islamic world. China invented a political system that fosters stability above all else which is why they have more uninterrupted civilization than any other culture but it comes at a cost of stagnation. The real debate within Chinese political culture is not capitalist/socialist but centralized/slightly-less-centralized. Europeans could never have come up with the concept of paper money without seeing it in action - the whole point is a monetary marker is worth whatever the emperor says it is and without an extremely stable and unassailable emperor that concept simply doesn't fly. As a consequence stability matters more than anything else because the minute that centralization slips, chaos ensues. Much of the technological progress within China, unsurprisingly, has come under Mongol (or British) occupation.

So yes - nominally private, nominally public, there are mechanisms of competition... but those mechanisms of competition are allowed more or less free reign depending on the degree of centralization within Chinese culture. Prior to Xi, for example, the effective salary of any mayoral-or-higher public employee was about 2.5 times as high as their actual salary, the additional 1.5x coming through bribery or graft. "Bribery or graft" has a lengthy economic history from the Tongs to the Italian city-states so it's not a market failure, just a different way of doing business - a highly decentralized way.

I also wanna pull this out:

We should avoid, by the way, framing this emotively as betrayal; Stalin did not betray the thoughtful internationalist Lenin but only was the development of the contradictions always present in Lenin from the start, which came from his own mixture of Russian revolutionary and theoretical Marxist ideals.

Lenin and Stalin were legit bank robbers. There's apologia for the hypocrisies and failings of the Communists and then there's "the development of the contradictions always present in Lenin from the start." We can gloss over "the Party’s bloody-minded focus on national development at all costs" but not if we're going to compare the fall of the Soviet Union to the fall of the Habsburg empire.

it's quite freewheeling, but i found it quite interesting: another quote:

The strange, uninspiring ideological cocktail of socialism with Chinese characteristics, from Deng Xiaoping Theory to Jiang’s Three Represents to Hu’s Harmonious Socialist Society all congealed into litany without much of a concrete meaning, with its endless list of numerical targets and PR-speak buzzwords, is not so far removed from Tony Blair’s Third Way, or David Cameron’s Big Society and Northern Powerhouse, or any of the other projects unveiled by the endlessly ambitious British political class since they stopped having ideas.