marxism

I don't really disagree with your points (although the 4 Asian tigers have definitely peaked and are experiencing some degree of stagnation and recession at least for the case of HK and Taiwan) but it goes back to my main point that the PRC isn't capitalist. Whether the PRC is socialist or not is whether you think "the PRC is neither capitalist nor socialist" is a copout answer or whether you think you can have a non-capitalist, non-socialist, and non-feudal mode of production.

It's hard for me to not see AES as a nascent stage of socialism in the same way I see Italian city-states of the Renaissance as a nascent stage of capitalism. Like AES of today with regards with socialism, Italian city-states aren't archetypal capitalist societies. They lack a proletarian and bourgeois class for one, and they have the trappings of feudal societies. But if you analyze them on a macro level, those Italian city-states don't really behave like feudal states. For one, actually existing feudalism like the Tang dynasty or the Carolingian empire derive their power from the land they control and the peasantry who work on that land. The peasantry can be utilized through corvee labor to work on public infrastructure projects or to form the bulk of a feudal army. The Italian city-states, on the other hand, are tiny in comparison, but despite their size, they punch well above their weight if they were just feudal societies. They derive their power more from being at an advantageous location of important trade routes, ruled by powerful merchant families rather than feudal lords. Unlike feudal societies but very similar to capitalist societies, the Italian city-states tried to solve many societal problems by simply throwing money at it. This is how they became (over)reliant on mercenary armies that would constantly betray them for the ever higher bidder. On an ideological level, the Italian city-states embraced Renaissance humanism, which is fundamentally anti-feudal and has various components that survives in liberalism. It doesn't make sense for an anti-feudal ideology to spring forth from a feudal base but perfectly reasonable if it's a nascent capitalist base which gave rise to an anti-feudal ideology.

If you traveled back in time to 1523, nobody would believe that Renaissance Italy would be the birth of a completely different mode of production. After all, Renaissance Italy weren't the first polities to leverage their advantageous location to get rich through trade. It's only through 500 more years of hindsight that people could see what would blossom in the Dutch Republic and Industrial Revolution England had its origins in those Italian city-states.