marxism

I do not believe China, Vietnam, and such can be considered AES as such, and indeed I think their leadership is actively moving in a capitalist direction (read Lin Chun's Revolution and Counterrevolution in China). I don't know enough about the political economy of Cuba to speak on that.

I think if you phrase the question as "why has China experienced so much economic growth relative to other Asian countries like India or Indonesia?" you wouldn't come to the conclusion that China is capitalist because the obvious subsequent question would be why did capitalism with Chinese characteristics take over while capitalism with Indian characteristics and capitalism with Indonesian characteristics haven't taken off. And I haven't heard any answer that didn't just boiled down to "Chinese capitalists are just big-brained while the other capitalists are dum-dums."

They may not be socialist, but they are not capitalist either. For example, I would argue the PRC is not capitalist because the country hasn't experienced a real boom/bust cycle in its 70+ years of existence. Notice that a bust cycle is different from any economic downturn like the GLF or Vietnam hitting an economic downturn because the Soviet Union collapsed and they still were heavily sanctioned. People don't emphasize this, but all other things equal, a socialist society should be able to more effectively and efficiently use the collective labor-hours of their society than a capitalist society.

Take something like the reserve army of labor, something that is inherent in all capitalist societies due to the inherent logic of capitalism but not inherent in socialist societies. A capitalist society can never reach full employment but a socialist society can. Because the capitalist society can't reach full employment, the workers there would have to work longer hours to make up for the reserve army of labor that could be employed but aren't. Longer hours means burnout, wear-and-tear of the body, greater chance of disease due to suppressed immune system and stress, and so on, which has a cumulative effect on how productive that society is. And by productive, I don't mean line go up GDP or just mindlessly producing commodities without caring about whether those commodities are socially necessary. I mean things like literacy rates, average child height (low height means children are suffering from malnutrition), miles of rail, whether a society is food sufficient, and so on.

On a micro level, no, I don't think a Chinese worker is fundamentally experiencing a society that is a whole lot different from a US worker. But just because this is true on a micro level doesn't means that it's true on a macro level. The question is how do you make sense of a society where on a micro level it's not a whole lot different from a capitalist society but on a macro level it's completely different?