Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy in the PRC, and the working classes control the state. For example, when looking at publicly owned industries, we can see the following:

Even checking Wikipedia, data from 2022 shows that the overwhelming majority of the top companies are publicly owned SOEs. This is China's strategy, they've been honest about it from the beginning. The private sector is about half cooperatives like Huawei or farming cooperarives and sole proprietorships, with the other half being small and medium firms. As these grow, they are folded into the public sector gradually. This is China's Socialist Market Economy.

As for the state being run by the working classes, this is also pretty straightforward. Public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the CPC, a working class party, dominates the state. At a democratic level, local elections are direct, while higher levels are elected by lower rungs. At the top, constant opinion gathering and polling occurs, gathering public opinion, driving gradual change. This system is better elaborated on in Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance, and we can see the class breakdown of the top of the government itself:

Overall, this system has resulted in over 90% of the population approving the government, which is shown to be consistent and accurate. If you want to learn more, while not nearly as in-depth due to time limits as Roland Boer's work (and mostly focused on the Xi Jinping era), Red Pen's A Summary of Xi Jinping's Governance of China can be a good primer! There's also This is how China's economic model works: Explaining Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Geopolitical Economy Report.

me when I do liberal reductionism and don't understand anything Lenin, Chairman Mao or Stalin wrote.

Edit: To more properly explain.

You rely on a crude, ahistorical definition of socialism and treats China as a static abstraction rather than a real society developing under concrete material conditions. You reduce Marxism to a legal-form checklist and ignores class power, historical development, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is a fundamental error.

In Marxism, “who owns the means of production” is not a question of paper titles but of class rule. Ownership only matters insofar as it expresses which class holds political power, controls surplus, and sets the direction of development. Defining socialism as the immediate abolition of all private enterprise is not Marxism; it is utopian liberal nonsense.

Lenin addressed this explicitly. Under proletarian rule, state capitalism is a socialist tool. His formulation is unambiguous: state capitalism under a dictatorship of the proletariat is not capitalism in the bourgeois sense but a form subordinated to socialist power and goals. The decisive issue is not whether markets or private firms exist, but which class commands them.

In China, the commanding heights of the economy are publicly owned and planned: land (state-owned in cities, collectively owned in the countryside), finance, energy, heavy industry, transport, telecommunications, arms production, and strategic resources. These sectors form the backbone of the economy. Private capital exists, but it does not dominate accumulation or political power.

The Chinese bourgeoisie does not rule. It has no independent state power and no ability to capture the party. Capitalists are subordinate to the Communist Party and can be regulated, expropriated, imprisoned, or eliminated when they conflict with socialist objectives. Recent crackdowns on tech monopolies, finance, real estate speculation, and billionaire figures demonstrate this class relation. In capitalist states, capital disciplines the state. In China, the state disciplines capital.

Surplus extraction and allocation further expose the difference. Under capitalism, surplus is privately appropriated and reinvested for profit. In China, surplus (especially from state and regulated sectors) is redirected toward long-term national development: infrastructure, industrial upgrading, poverty eradication, and technological independence. The largest poverty reduction in human history did not occur through laissez-faire capitalism, but through state-directed socialist accumulation (nearly a billion people lifted from poverty).

Chairman Mao was also clear that socialism is not a finished endpoint but a long historical process filled with contradictions. He emphasized that class struggle continues under socialism and that development occurs through uneven, conflicting processes. Socialism is transitional by definition: it emerges from capitalism, contains remnants of it, and advances toward communism through struggle and transformation. Treating socialism as a stable, contradiction-free end state is anti-Marxist.

Calling China “authoritarian capitalism” is ridiculous. I've already dealt with the "capitalism" issue but also authoritarian is a useless modifier used by liberals to easily bundle together countries that opposed the status quo as evil and immoral. Try reading On Authority

“Everything else follows from there” is exactly wrong. Everything follows from class power, historical conditions, and the direction of development. Your reductionist liberal framework cannot explain why China plans five-year strategies, suppresses finance capital, controls land, resists imperialism, and openly declares socialism as its goal. Marxism can however.

The people, the people.