Do you understand even remotely the inequality of development in 1970's China? By absolute standards? I'm guessing you don't appreciate the magnitude of that. It's the contradiction that Mao couldn't figure out how to bridge. Western powers had developed some industry before the CPC took charge. But large swathes of the country were stuck in roughly medieval peasantry. Mao was able to spread wealth in an egalitarian way but not actually realize sufficient growth to survive western imperialism. There is essentially no reduction in global poverty over the last several decades without china taking large fractions of their alienated labor product and investing it in rural areas. Marx's ideas about socialism were written under the assumption of wide spread industrialism -- existing capitalist production. The peasants seizing there farms can produce a rural communalism at best, but you simply can't reach abundance that way.

you sent me a bunch of professors saying that opening up chinese citizens to foreign and domestic capitalist exploitation is a necessity for developing socialism

it was a necessity for china

seriously, do you have any idea how miserable china was in 1980? people couldn't afford fucking bicycles, they were poorer than all of sub-saharan africa except for like 2 countries, and much poorer, just try to picture the meaning of an $160 per capita gdp (no missing zeroes here, it really was in the low 3 digits)

they had to do something because clearly a planned economy just wasn't working, they didn't have endogenous capabilities for growth given that despite every previous effort they were still basically in the 19th century

if you don't have those endogenous capabilities then you gotta go somewhere else and they sure as hell wouldn't go to the soviets, so what did you want them to do? to stay miserable?

even with all the exploitation of the 90s (which has been falling consistently since the late 00s), they were still living in better material conditions than 1980. it was cool that people had some of the basic stuff before then, but life still fucking sucked over there

I don't look at Marxism as a set of unchanging dogmas, but a living ideology that examines contradictions from a scientific perspective, and therefore has to evolve and change as history progresses and as we learn new information. Actual revolutions and existing socialist experiments have shown that getting beyond wage labor and the dominance of capital is very difficult, and cannot be done on a basis of poverty. I admire the CPC because ever since the Chinese revolution, and especially since the period of Reform and Opening Up, they've been able to tremendously improve the living conditions of the Chinese people. If they had followed a strictly capitalist path, they could not have done this, as the history of capitalism decisively shows.

Yes, China has wage labor and capitalists, but that's not the be all and end all to Marxism- there's also the fundamental irrationality of an economy that's dominated by profit. Mao Zedong defined capitalism as a system of "profits in command," and systems of profit in command create poverty amidst abundance. Looking at the Chinese economy today, profits are not in command of it. The major sectors of the economy are controlled by the state, which works to benefit the people through five-year plans. The advances and surpluses created by the market sector do not create new poor people, but rather serve to lift up the living standards of the people as a whole. The lives of the workers may have many difficulties, but when you compare their standard of living now vs. before the revolution, they are much better off. This is a result of rational planning, what Engels calls socialized production according to a predetermined plan.

Spend some time in Asia, China sticks out very obviously from the rest of Asia and especially its peer India.