So I've been putting off writing this for a long time and it'll probably need to be a series, but I've had a difficult time answering challenges from my friends who assert that China is either a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie or of the Bureaucracy (i.e. state capitalists), and that it's a competing imperialist power along with America (and they also say Russia but I can answer that one being stupid on my own).
The problem with China Discourse is that there is a serious paucity of sources dealing with nuanced critiques rather than just "debt trap!" bullshit or whatever, since the objections of liberals and the objections of smarter ultras are very different. At the very least, the sources dealing with this Discourse are less accessible to me.
But now I'm extremely bored and also recently saw Comrade Queermmunist's excellent rebuttal against the claim of China doing imperialism in the DRC, which gave me some hope that Hexbear would be able to answer some of these claims with something at least plausible.
The main objects of concern are the for-profit national businesses causing bureacratic class antagonism, foreign policy in the form of UN peacekeeping contributions, and straightforward imperialism at the base of its supply chain, along with miscellany like this:
https://newworker.us/international/chinas-stock-market-a-lesson-on-what-socialism-is-not/
I don't know, it's all a mess and putting off ideological work causes problems. If nothing else, let this be a practical lesson to you:
To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.
It catches up with you and makes things worse in the end.
I was with you until the last paragraph. It is correct to say that state capitalism as defined by ultras is something that can exist, for as you said, if you switched the major corporations' boards of trustees with de facto heads of state (and did nothing else to change the relationship workers have to the means of production) then that's essentially what you would have: state capitalism. Given the revolving door that sees CEOs becoming politicians, that's not too far off from a lot of our so-called liberal democracies we actually have in the west, it's just that a pretense of a delineation between the two (as well as a pretense of public approval) is maintained.
But the key thing to understand here is the part about the worker's relationship to the means of production. As robin_IV already explained, the state is simply the tool that the ruling class uses to enforce its interests. It makes no sense to say that the state "should not be getting all that power over the workers" if it is the workers who are the ones wielding the state. And that is definitely desirable! It's what we desire as communists who recognize we can't achieve a classless society in one fell swoop.