Ah, ignorance fought. Thank you.
I knew a number of people in the university research community way back when, and that was exactly how they described Soviet control as told by the Russian scjentists they interacted with. The days of children turning in parents and being sent to the gulag for criticizing the state were long past. People could chat at get-togethers and say what they thought about the government. As long as they didn’t make real trouble, nobody cared. Just… don’t organize, don’t make trouble, don’t be quoted in foreign press criticizing the government.
China seems to be even looser. The day we took a day trip to see the terracotta warriors in Xian we were stuck in a traffic jam for an hour, then eventually walked a half a mile to our hotel, because a massive student demonstration had blocked the major streets downtown all afternoon and evening. Supposedly it was over those islands between Japan and China, and news reports we saw when we got home said that the government likes to encourage demonstrations against foreign powers - especially Japan, which they hate - to let off steam and distract from internal problems. However, that’s a helluva lot more freedom than the Soviets ever allowed.
China is not a fascist nation. Fascism originated out of Syndicalism and Italian Corporatism. The fascist way to organize an economy was built in reaction to the socialist critique of capitalist competition. The fascists thought it was wasteful and cruel that businesses competed against one another and that this lead to wasteful redundancies and unstable races to the bottom for worker rights. Their solution was to bring businesses together in industry wide alliances that followed rules dictated by the government on behalf of the workers and the nation. China does not have any of the industry wide syndicates.
China is a mixed economy in which state owned enterprises exist to a much greater degree than in the west but most of the economy is privately owned and operated companies. State owned enterprises make up anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of the economy. Many of these companies are owned by local governments and not the central government. These companies have significant regulatory advantages over privately owned companies but are shrinking as a percentage of the economy over time as the inherent inefficiencies of public ownership leave them unable to compete with their private counterparts.
Where China remains communistic is in political structure. There is only one party, and the only way to achieve political power is within the party structure. By western standards civil rights there are awful but by communist standards the party has a light touch and mostly does not bother people who are not rocking the boat.