At face value, your assessment makes sense.

Reform and opening up led to an economy that appeared more capitalist, but the communist party stayed in control. Rather than letting the markets and capitalists gain economic power AND political power, they only allowed them to gain economic power in order to speed up industrialization.

While we see capital controlling political will in liberal countries, they have no control in China and are kept in check by the party. This was less obvious over the decades after the policy began until about the 2010s, when China began shifting back in the socialist direction economically. They used capitalism to strengthen their economy, but never relinquished political control to capitalists. If they were indeed shifting towards capitalism, you would likely see them deindustrializing and shifting towards a finance-based economy more akin to the US. Labor rights would be deprioritized and industries would outsource their labor as wages increased. Instead you see the government making policies to strongly incentivize industries to continue with domestic production rather than outsourcing.

Take a look at the actions of the party and what you hear from Xi these days. Read through some of his writings. Does what you hear from the party and do the actions they are taking now seem like they are transitioning to capitalism when you dig a bit deeper and put it into this perspective?

Markets predate capitalism. Markets =/= capitalism. The chinese practice market socialism, and at this point, it should be clear the difference between reform and opening up and the travesty that is shock therapy that was done to the former USSR.

There are many things wrong with ProleWiki.

This is not one of them.

What is with the lib drive-through comments on China recently on here? Outright lazy.

Your premise is that China had already achieved socialism and then went backwards towards capitalism but in reality they were a semi-feudal semi-colonized agrarian state, had a communist revolution, and began building towards socialism which is a process that takes generations. If socialism comes after capitalism and capitalism comes after feudalism, it means that with China being a feudal pre-industrial society during their revolution, they must enter into and move through a capitalist phase to develop and expand the means of production and socialize labor in order to create the conditions to build socialism. Socialism can not be built directly out of feudalism, just like capitalism couldn't come directly out of slave economies.

The key is that the entire capitalist phase of China was controlled by a Communist party with the express goal of building socialism, unlike every capitalist nation without a dictatorship of the proletariat, where the express goal was to build capitalism in order to make money for the capitalists. It should be obvious at this point if you look at the metrics: Chinese people have a higher quality of life, more purchasing power, greater social welfare, and virtually none of the key social problems that the capitalist core countries have, despite the capitalist countries having vastly more developed economies earlier and vastly more resources readily available through colonial plunder and chattel slavery. China is very clearly run by true Communists because if not, they wouldn't have any of these things, and would look more like India or any other nation in the Global South.

Capitalism is a mixed economy.

But capitalism is not "when the government does stuff" or "when the market does something."

It is not.

Not when the proles still run the place and especially given the reforms didn't surrender party control.