Neoliberalism is a way of squeezing new profits out of the people of a given area via deregulation, destroying labor protections, forcing an export market economy owned by foreign/international capital, and gutting of services. China does not meet those criteria...

If we're talking about post-Deng, you can find some overlap. There was some deregulation, China's special economic zones and so on. There was some undermining of labor protections, though it's way more complicated than that and they've actually improved over time. They created an export market, but not one where foreign capital gets everything, where it's pure imperialism, as China forces the capital to stay in China, with IP transfer and training etc. There is exploitation because the capitalist machine hasn't been killed off, but it's for ed into public works and massive state investment, the exact opposite of neoliberalism. Services and state investment/ ownership have massively increased lately.

Another question might be how is China not simply capitalist, so we don't have to argue about neoliberalism. There is, of course, capitalism in China. If you read Chinese sources and Chinese theory, they say this plainly. It's not a gotcha. The special economic zones are, in theory, a caged beast of capitalism that constantly tries to break out of it's cage and constantly leaks harmful shit out of it - but a caged beast that can itself be exploited for the development of industry, infrastructure, services, etc, and slowly nationalized. That's the main question: how well is that going, how do you keep the capitalists from taking over, how much exploitation can you suffer in the name of overall national development against ruthless capital?

The production part of the gamble is uncontested. China has massively industrialized. The capturing of capital into public investment is also uncontested: combined with productive capacity, the quality of life has massively improved. The risk of capital taking everything over seemed to be increasing over the decades. China has liberal economists in high places and its party apparatus kept letting in more and more capitalists. But under Xi's faction, this has started to move in the other direction, with capital's influence getting repeatedly reined in. China's handling of its real estate crisis is the perfect example of this. A neoliberal, or even typically capitalist country, would shovel money into financialized bullshit to prevent the firms from failing and taking everyone with them. They'd either provide liquidity to real estate itself or, more likely, do a bunch of financialized shenanigans that out a ton of state resources into it with no real consequences or long-term fixes. China controls its financial sector and is making real estate capitalists accept their own failure, and is moving slowly in the direction of nationalization, or something much closer to it.

China also has a (good) habit of slowly nationalizing entire industries, even though new private ones keep popping in and growing.