**USSR Economy **
The USSR had commodity-production and wage labor i.e workers working for salaries and then buying stuff with that money. Commodity production means making things to be sold, rather than to be used immediately. Firms in the USSR, post-Stalin had pseudo market-type reforms i.e they had to take loans from the state, pay interest, had to be profitable and there even was a type of psuedo competition between the state enterprises, but at the same time they had to follow the plan set by the state. This is what people mean by state capitalism.
The USSR had many problems mainly because they were emulating capitalism without the key ingredient that causes capitalism to be productive : real competition between capitalist. The market style reforms also made planning difficult as firms had to follow the plan while being profitable at the same time. Technological development was slow as the economic incentives didnt work as intended. For example, shutting the firm down for retooling meant loss of revenue. Firms would rather work with old inefficient methods than shut down to upgrade their technology.
Even during Stalin's time, the USSR had wage-labor, commodity production etc, but the major difference was that capital goods were mostly allocated based on their use-values rather than their exchange values, meaning that capital goods were mostly not treated like commodities. Some Marxist economists believe this is the secret behind the phenomenal economic growth during Stalin's time. The conversion of peasants into urban workers also played a role in economic growth, but this is not unique to socialism.
Interestingly, in 1965, Che Guevara studied Stalin's economic methods and wanted to implement Stalin style socialism(where the state operated as a single enterprise) rather than Khruschev style socialism(pseudo market reforms, marginalist economics etc). Unfortunately he died in 1967. To the best of my knowledge, Cuba did not adopt that model.
Now most people wont consider any system without private ownership and competition as capitalism, but Marxists understand capitalism as more than that : capitalism is generalized commodity production. Imagine if Amazon and Walmart merge and take over the entire market of distributing consumer goods. So now, anything that you buy will come from Walmazon only. In this scenario, Walmazon becomes so powerful, it can become the state, and it operates without competition. It can control who gets what, plans where to set up shops, who gets what jobs etc. Now imagine the US govt takes ownership of Walmazon. Now you have the People's Republic of the USA. But nothing has fundamentally changed, from private Walmazon to Peoples Repubic of USA, in the way commodity production occurs. There is no private property and no competition. But the basic capitalist system : producing commodities, wage-labor, buying and selling stuff etc would still exist. This hypothetical system would be somewhat similar to what USSR, China, Vietnam etc all had before their full capitalist restoration.
The USSR's experience was as long as commodity production existed, you have to create rational incentives for economic growth. These incentives rapidly converge into market-style reforms. This is the ironic reason why the USSR collapsed. They didnt realize that the problems they were facing was due to such reforms, and the more they reformed, the more problems they had. The additional problems were assumed to be because of central planning rather than the reforms, so they further increased reforms. Near the end of the USSR, they had a massive shadow economy, slowing economic growth and excess military spending. The shadow economy generated a shadow capitalist class, who came out into the open with the collapse of the USSR as its new ruling class.
** China's politics **
There was a lot of debate in the 1970s China about the economic strategy, and they came to this conclusion : that China needed to develop productive forces rapidly by any means necessary. The "return to capitalism" under Deng, was really a return to private property and real competition from state ownership and no competition. From an inefficient neutered form of capitalism to "true" capitalism.
However, the reform and opening up of China was fundamentally different to the reform and opening up of all the other third-world countries that still remain poor. China's massive market, their ability to build a competent infrastructure and relatively strong rule of law meant that they could extract concessions from capitalists, both foreign and domestic. From foreign capitalists, they "stole" technologies that enabled them to rapidly catch up. Their authoritarian state power meant that domestic capitalists couldnt do whatever they wanted like in the USA, but have to follow state mandates regarding the overall direction of development.
China's SOE(state owned enterprises) played a major role in this development that even Marxist economists havent fully figured out. Inspite of being generally inefficient and slower to respond than private enterprises, they played an important role in developing advanced industries that private firms would never have done due to lack of profitability involved, the massive investment and long term planning required. They worked to temporarily absorb unemployed and were a key part of the "commanding heights" that need to be controlled to ensure state power.
So China is unique in that it is a (mostly) free-market privately owned capitalist economy controlled by a (nominally) socialist ruling class. Now you might wonder, how do we know whether China's ruling class is truly socialist? The answer is not easy. One way to know, is to see which side they will take during a capitalist crisis, which China is yet to experience. Another way is to see their day to day actions, whether they benefit workers or capitalists. The recent shutting down of Ant financial was a massive blow to financial capital, its not something you would ever see in a capitalist country.
Also regarding their "imperialism", their African investments are the opposite of imperialism. China is loaning low interest loans to African countries, along with lending expertise, to build value-adding infrastructure in these poor countries. Even right-wing economist admit that Chinese investment is helping in ways that decades of western neocolonialism and "foreign aid" couldn't.
It is commonly admitted among the Western ruling class that they misjudged the nature of Chinese "return to capitalism". They had assumed that reforms would eventually bring the capitalist class back to power, and the experience of USSR, Jiang Zemin's and Hu Jinatos liberal rule, and general trend of history, further solidified their belief of the "end of history". Then Daddy Xi came in, reasserted the ruling role of the CPC and now you have the anti-Chinese manufactured consent on the Western consciousness as the ruling class has come to realize the true nature of Chinese capitalism.
Now comes the key question, will China ever move to "real socialism"? First it would be useful to understand what socialism is.
Real socialism
Socialism means the common ownership of means of production and free distribution of all goods. There is no salaries and so no wage-labor. No salaries means no money. No money means no markets. No markets implies no private property. No private property, no competition. And crucially, there is no commodity-production. All goods and services produced are produced for the purpose of consumption, not for exchange. This means that all production and distribution of goods and services is done consciously, according to a plan.
It is very easy to now understand, why the statement "true socialism has never been tried" makes sense, and also why it is not easy to simply do away with commodity-production in a world where trading between nations(and hence the reintroduction of commodity production) is necessary to attain a reasonable level of development.
Marx also believed it was possible to have a "lower form" of socialism, where instead of money, people received labour-vouchers that could only be exchanged for consumption goods (and hence cannot be used as money). This would continue until the productive forces were advanced enough to achieve an abundance of produce for all.
So will real socialism come to China soon? It will depend on the way China's capitalism evolves, and since the direction of Chinese capitalism is controlled by the socialist state, China has the possibility of socialism.
Edit: Under Stalin, firms that adopted new techniques were subsidized which led to fast dispersion of technological advancements.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the ratio of state owned to private enterprises somewhere around 50/50? And also, private ownership doesn't always mean the type of private ownership that we see as dominant in western capitalist countries since worker cooperatives are also technically "private enterprises", just that they are privately owned by a collective of the people who do the work at the enterprise rather than one person or a small group of people who contribute little in the way of actual labor.
For example, Huawei is technically a private company, but it is also technically a worker co-op with the majority of its shares being owned by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, a trade union which represents all domestic Chinese Employees of Huawei, and allows their worker to vote on the 115 member Representation committee that ultimately selects the board of director and board of supervisors for the company. The ACFTU is also controlled by the CPC, which would also make Huawei a sort of semi-state owned enterprise in a way.
So while I agree that China has a long way to go before meeting enough criteria to be considered as fully socialist, and that mere government control is not socialism, the CPC still controls almost the entire economy of China, through a mixture of SOEs, party run unions, and CPC committees within private enterprises, so to call China a "privately owned capitalist economy" is perhaps a bit of an over simplification at best. It would take a fair bit of research, but I think it would beneficial for the left to do a thorough analysis of how exactly Chinese enterprises are run internally (ie: worker democracy, etc.) for both private and public enterprises, and to break down the composition of China's private economy to see what types of enterprises there are (ie: multi-nationals, co-ops, etc.), and to what degree the CPC has control over them.
There's existing Marxist analysis on how the Chinese economy functions such as this and this book, the first of which goes through a decent amount of it to argue the economy is driven to ecological collapse in the way it is ran. Don't know if there's other book length works that are recent. There's random papers here and there from the few Marxist economists in the US that have been in dialogue with Chinese economics such as this paper from the mid 2000s (which paints a super unhealthy picture of debate and Marx in China).
Some of those takes from pro-privatization economist are absolutely mind boggling, like how tf do you argue Marx as being pro private property.
That said, I do kind of wonder how relevant those texts are in our current moment, since the article is from 2007, and the book seems like it’s probably from back when Chinese pollution was a much more obvious problem to people with how smog choked their cities were up until a few years ago. On the environmental front, I’d actually say China’s future is probably looking up for now. From what I understand President Xi is an environmentalist himself and has been one of the main reasons for China’s cleanup in recent years. Also, the CPC under his leadership seems to be going against a lot of the pro-privatization currents seen in the article with crackdowns against corrupt gov/party officials, and most recently, with the shutdown of Jack Ma’s plans which would’ve shifted a lot of economic power away from the CPC and into private hands, so it’d be interesting to see what debates are happening among Chinese economists nowadays.
I do not think it's much different, the same people in the departments are still there and their students are. The book also focuses on how Xi's efforts, whatever their underlying motivations, are fundamentally not going to work on a material basis. Like the point of the book is even with the environmental reforms, the underlying driving factors of the economy (including the form the state run production takes, which is not going to be changed), are what stops the reforms from fully succeeding.
I mean look at the people who are on Xi's side like Jiang Shigong. His goal of making China "Marxist" again is to shore up state authority, rejuvenate the Chinese people, and polish the global image both of the country as well as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Actual Marxist analysis of value, alienation, radical republicanism, class struggle, is not there. I mean Shigong advocates for the ideas of Carl Schmitt and calls himself a "conservative socialist". He is not a Marxist.