Genuine question so please don’t hate on me. It seems to me that china now is more of a mixed market than a planned economy. Billionaires and class disparities definitely still exist in China and it seems like american communists almost romanticize china while ignoring obvious flaws in its system, only because they (rightfully) hate america and america hates China. China also supplies all of the world’s exploitative corporations with the vast majority of their goods. While China is probably better than the capitalist economies of the west, I don’t understand why a lot of people seem to hold it in the same regard as the USSR.
There's so little hope in the "west" that I think a lot of leftists look at China, its achievements, the party's rhetoric, and they desperately want to believe cuz there's nothing else. Like "this has to be our way out" kinda thing. But you can imagine how that clouds someone's view. It reminds of Finkelstein talking about how he was so devoted to Maoist China that at first he couldn't even process the Deng reforms.
There's also the fact that most people, leftists included, don't know much about China. Most the reporting on China comes from liberals, so most on here (justifiably) dismiss it. But if you can read critically and generally avoid newspaper OpEd sections you can get a lot of useful information from them. Mahbubani for example worked at the UN Security Council and is a liberal but that doesn't stop him from spending a whole chapter debunking every case of "Chinese aggression" in the South China sea and highlighting western hypocrisy.
But there's a lot of good leftist sources or at least left-lib people who talk about China like David Harvey or Adam Tooze.
I think it's that people just need a win of some kind. So they identify with China, which is in opposition to America (which obviously makes it right) and China has some measurable power in the world and sometimes gets wins. So they get to identify with that win and spike the football in America's face. It's an emotional need in a lonely world.