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.
They're certainly at a crossroads, but you could argue that the Deng reforms were necessary and had to go on longer than the NEP in the Soviet Union because China was so far behind Russia in development at the time of its revolution. Russia before World War 1 was the backwater of Europe, but it was still a major imperial power which had 5-10x the industrial output per capita of China and a much, much larger proletariat. Mao's land reforms were an awesome and necessary step, but at some point it was obvious that China needed some sort of Capitalist development to build productive forces. The NEP was a temporary measure for the USSR to recover from the war/revolution. Deng's liberalization was a necessary step to actually build China's industry, and now we've reached the point where some hard decisions need to be made.