China is hardly even Maoist and not at all aligned with the ideals of Marx. Communism means the abolition of class in the form of salaried labour, the worker's ownership of the means of production and the dissolution of the state—there has never been communism. There is also a transitional form, characterised by Marx's phrase from each according to ability, to each according to need, which is socialism. The Chinese government claims to be transitioning into communism, that is, it claims to be socialist, but it is clearly neither communist nor socialist by any broadly agreed historical definition. Now China's failure is a failure of the left—as someone on the left, quite unlike most capitalists, I have no problem accepting our more calamitous failures and opposing tendencies (the devaluing of democracy, notions of socialism in one country, etc.) that aim to reproduce them. But any theoretically literate Marxist (and certainly most from the non-Marxist left, such as anarchists and non-Marxist democratic socialists) would be disgusted by China's current social organisation. Keep in mind that for Marx, something he shared with many the right-wing. traditionalist critics of liberal capitalism, the alienation of the individual was one of the great evils of capitalism—he would have seen China's hideous deployment of technology as abhorrent.
