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The world’s second most powerful country is run by avowed Marxist-Leninists as a one-party state by a Leninist vanguard party; Marx and Lenin’s writings are taught as fact in its schools, its political elite are often true believers, many of the aesthetics (eg. socialist realism in public art) of Marxism-Leninism remain the default there and so on. That they embrace a limited form of capitalism (so did Lenin with the NEP, by the way) doesn’t change that.
As said by others, China is not a Marxist-Leninist state in anything but name.
Key among the tenants of Marxism is a theory of history, where capitalism is but a step on a path that goes like this:
feudalism
capitalism
socialism / dictatorship of the proletariat
communism.
Communism being the end state where property and money are no longer necessary.
Yes, the USSR backtracked slightly from socialism->capitalism during the NEP years. This lasted for what, like 5 years? A temporarily pause until Stalin asserted control, and it was after the NEP, during the 1930s that Communist beliefs were strongest in Russia and worldwide. Useful idiots in the U.S. even moved to the Soviet Union to join the wonderful utopia. The vice president of the U.S. was a fellow traveler. Many westerners thought that centrally planned economies were inevitable, even desirable. That is what belief looks like.
China, on the other hand, has been capitalist for 45 years now. Where is the path towards communism? Does anyone in China actually think things are headed in that direction? Of course not. To quote Deng, "to get rich is glorious".
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China is not run as Marxism-Leninism in any meaningful way.
England is closer to theocratic dictatorship than China is to Marxism-Leninism.
Wealth inequality existing doesn’t mean that China isn’t run along Marxist-Leninist lines. There was always inequality in the USSR, between jobs, regions and people.
Wealth inequality is hardly the only mismatch from claimed Marxist-Leninist.
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You can avow, believe, and teach something all day long. That doesn’t mean you are that thing.
China is about as Marxist-Leninist as the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. If you want to “no true Marxism-Leninism has ever been tried” me, then go ahead, but in a real sense yes the CCP is a successful Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and minor alterations in economic doctrine over the last forty years do not change that fact.
Well, that is true, but only in the trivial sense that the ideology is incoherent, and therefore it can't actually be tried. If China was truly MLM, then they would at least be on the path towards the withering away of the state and the transition to a classless, moneyless society - they would at least have it as a goal. But plainly the leadership of China does not view this as a desirable goal in any sense. And I don't blame them - it's not a coherent goal, it's not something that can actually be achieved.
I don't know what level of centralized state planning it would take for me to say that China has a different "economic system" than the US. I haven't thought much about it. I'm skeptical of the idea that we can meaningfully speak of different types of economic systems in the first place - I'm skeptical of the idea that there was a distinct "feudalist mode of production" for example. The US, like China, also has government management of the economy and public-private cooperation. It strikes me as a difference of degree rather than kind.
If "Marxism-Leninism was a spent force by the 1980s" means anything, then I think it would mean something like "by the 1980s, even the true believers recognized that the global socialist utopia was not going to materialize". And I don't think there are any true true believers among China's leadership or intelligentsia today. True believers in central state planning, sure - but Marxism never took central state planning to be its ultimate goal.
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