This is an excellent thread on interpreting Chinese ideology, which touches on many of the shortcomings in China analysis, but it equally demonstrates how strange the presuppositions of Western liberalism are.
What's strange about the Chinese Communist Party from the Western liberal perspective is that (1) it has ends (goals), (2) it subordinates means to ends, (3) it has an objective view of the social realm, and (d) it believes that governance can be rational.
Note that all of these beliefs would be perfectly normal in a non-political context, but the Western liberal tradition explicitly repudiates all of them. It renounces political goals, believes only in means, and is overtly subjectivist and irrationalist.
Here, for example, we see that from a liberal perspective the law of excluded middle itself is an oddity. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party believes logic applies to the political realm is something alien to a liberal audience.
This is something of an overstatement: there can be legitimate disagreement, but it is always resolvable. Liberalism places value outside of rationality (it's essentially just how you feel about stuff) and so such disagreements have no resolution.
In the West, markets, the legal system, etc, are dogmatic principles that must be upheld regardless of outcome. In China, they're tools to be used for specific ends and if they don't work, you do something different.
