I often hear people in the West deride China as communist and a much worse place than America. I'd like to understand why. The term "socialist" or "communist" is not detailed enough to explain why, so give more details.

Free markets, private property ownership, and the profit motive are very powerful, distributed things that make a country rich. China has adopted all of them. They say it is "glorious to get rich" and there are wealthy business owners making a killing.

What appears to be different is that China has the CCP which acts as a top-down authority that can pretty much do whatever it wants. So people have economic freedom as long as they don't piss off the CCP.

But America's executive has sovereign immunity. The Executive branch can violate all kinds of laws and you cannot sue them for it. They can ignore the Supreme Court (and have). And they have all the ultimate power. So just like in China, you have economic freedom as long as you don't piss off Joe Biden.

So to me the difference is only in the specifics. China controls speech a lot more (which I very much don't like), but the US is trying hard to catch up. China still tries to do "think big" projects that most Western countries already learnt should be market driven, not government driven.

What did I miss? I must have missed something important.