From my perspective, the Chinese project as evolved into something like trying to wrap a great socialist party around a capitalist economy in an effort to mitigate the disastrous consequences of capitalist development and prevent the state from becoming subordinate to market forces. Capitalism always requires a strong state in order to function. Western nations chop up state power so that market forces determine the agenda of imperialism. Socialist or burgeoning socialist nations seem to try to keep the state as strong and centralized as possible, while (somewhat attempting) discouraging the individual accumulation of political power to stave off corruption and consolidation of personal interest. This seems to be one of the main points of failure of this model, but the extent to which the country is successful is the extent to which they are able to persist and project the possibility of socialist society into the future.

I'm open to critique of this analysis as I'm aware of some assumptions present in my method.