GenZedong

China wouldn’t have made it this far without “opening up,” the purpose of which was to accelerate the development of the productive forces by importing capital, technology, and knowledge from advanced capitalist states.

The capitalist states didn’t realize this at the time, though. They thought China’s “opening up” was the “liberalization” of China, as happened to the USSR. China punked them. The West de-industrialized itself for “cheap” labor, and now China holds the cards.

https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/ not trying to be adversarial! but this is a useful writeup about china i refer a lot of people to a lot of the time about topics like this, if it's being brought up to argue a potential betrayal of socialism. in fact, whenever i see that phrase i perk up like a sleeper agent

Analyzed metaphysically, ie stripping it of the context for why this happened, can make it seem pretty bad. But when viewed dialectically, ie placing it in its correct moment in time and as a response to China's gross underdevelopment, it has paid off enormously. New contradictions arose, of course, but with it socialism has been maintained and we are now witnessing the era of imperialist decay and rising socialism.

I highly recommend this conversation I had with another user, one opposed to "Dengism" (initially, perhaps not by the end). Both of us flesh out our points and speak from a place of trying to understand one another, which was quite productive compared to liberal debate-as-bloodsport.