China is an instance of State Capitalism, where the government owns the means of production, and uses it for profit-generation. The only reason that anyone in the West actually believes it’s at all Communist is because we’re so indoctrinated by Red Scare propaganda that most people can’t tell the difference between “workers own” and “the government owns”, since the only kind of private ownership we recognize is ownership by corporations and plutocrats.
Ownership by an autocrat or by an oligarchy is not public ownership.