Hi all. I'm an Aussie. For an idea of my interests, mosy on over to my site.
We are not arguing that China is a "communist" (lower-case "c") society in the Marxist sense, that is a state where the means of production are under common ownership. Whether or not China is a "socialist" society in Marxian terms, defined by state ownership of the means of production, is further irrelevant to this debate. In this context, the term "Communist state" (upper-case "C") strictly refers to the type of government in the same sense that "constitutional monarchy" describes the governments of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, that "federal republic" describes the government-types of the United States and Brazil, that "Islamic republic" describes the government-type of Iran, that "military government" describes the government of Myanmar, and finally that "absolute monarchy" would describe the government of Oman. The government is Communist, ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party.
Divergences between the development levels, levels of state ownership, and economic structures between the five Communist states of China, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and North Korea or whether or not China is "capitalist" and has betrayed its Marxist-Leninist philosphy thus don't matter to this discussion (I personally think that they haven't and that they've finally found a workable model of socialism worth revisiting, but that doesn't matter either). The ruling Communist parties of these countries share roughly the same structure and share similarly intertwined state and party institutions and share roughly the same constitutional forms. They represent a common government-type based on the Leninist state and are bound by having to adapt to similar circumstances, that is (with the exception of Castro's Cuba which wasn't at first definitively Communist) supplanting or revamping existing state institutions to fit the mold of an underground revolutionary political party.
I accidentally removed the link. Thanks for restoring it. It’s just that Fred Bauer keeps on coming back to this article to make POV insertions, forcing me to restore the precise intro and NPOV version. In the process, I just forgot to put "Communist state" in brackets. 172