Probably other comrades will be able to answer what I can’t, but it’s not capitalism that “saved” China.

Socialism requires productive forces to be advanced enough to support itself. Factories are great for doing this; you can produce so much more items per hour in a factory than you could working from home, like people used to do in the middle ages. This is a desirable outcome in socialism (though I am not speaking on the social aspect of factories, just the economical aspect) because it allows us to create more value to redistribute and support more people. In capitalism, factories are desirable because the capitalist can appropriate the surplus value created in their factory and become individually richer.

The idea that China has become capitalist is what liberals truly believe because they are incapable of understanding the Chinese system. They see private property and markets in China and since we have private property and markets too, and we are capitalists, then China must be capitalist as well.

But more importantly, China understood that what mattered was the class character of the state, like Marx did earlier. China is a dictatorship of the proletariat, and that is why it’s wrong to say that they are simply capitalist. The CPC runs the country on the principles of Leninism (though they describe themselves as Mao Zedong Thought as well, which is not to be confused with Maoism). They are not a neoliberal country like most capitalists today, they are marxist-leninist. As such, they make 5 year plans and hold themselves to them. They nationalize any company that grows past a certain size. They have auditors from the CPC in almost all businesses. The CPC forces wages to grow, and as such wages have doubled since 2010 in China. Imagine that – when was the last time any of us got any salary increase? And while sometimes people worry that there are too many billionaires in China, per capita there really aren’t that many. In the various parliaments China has (which go from the city level up to the national level, the People’s Congress) there are at most 20 capitalists, and none in the Congress.

These are some characteristics that allow us to say China is not capitalist, because these characteristics are found in leninist countries (such as the USSR), but never in liberal capitalist countries.

To answer your question, I understand China opened up to the world under Deng Xiaoping and became “the world’s manufacturer” – which was true up until a decade or two ago, as China now produces their own hi-tech and are no longer limited to unqualified labour mass-producing everyday items. Deng understood that China needed to grow their productive forces, and that is why they opened factories massively. He negotiated Hong Kong’s return (and got it back for almost nothing), he opened up trade relations with the USA, and overall certainly made the country richer. But some people also criticize him for opening up too much, because it was under Deng that you started seeing millionaires and private enterprise in China.

At the time, in the 80s and 90s, China was not the economy it is today and so liberals saw no harm in using Chinese labour. They thought they could maybe subjugate them again, force them to accept neoliberal reforms and accept foreign capital, which imperialists hoped would let them invade China once and for all (if you’re familiar with history, you’ll know colonisers tried to subjugate the whole of China but never got much further away than the coast, though their trade and policies did completely destroy the country). Of course as marxists, Deng and others knew that they could not let this happen and they were gonna have to play the game, so to speak.

So to answer why China is so powerful today: there is a huge creation of wealth in their country because of just how much they produce and export, and they are able to develop because of the five year plans, because they are a dictatorship of the proletariat. In capitalism like we see in India (comparable to China in the 80s), we see that not much has evolved – at least not on the level of China. This is because in India, like in any other neoliberal country, new wealth goes to the bourgeoisie who hoards it for themselves and nothing can ever get done.

In China when something needs to get built, they don’t wait for a developer to propose a plan – which will take years because the developer waits for demand to grow so that they can charge more when selling the units (say apartments), then put out a call for construction companies to bid on the project who will promise a super low price (only way you’ll get accepted) but then delay the construction so they can go over budget and charge more, only to end up with super expensive housing in the middle of nowhere because the private developer wanted to make an oasis in a gated community. They take up a state-owned construction company and say “hey we need housing here because people will be living here in 5 years as the city grows. Also start on a subway station, it’s kinda far from the city centre” and the company says “okay”, because they have no choice. This is how China keeps growing.

@CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml has a very good answer, so I’ll leave this up, but in the future use !communism101@lemmygrad.ml