Is China communist?

There has been a huge amount of privatisation. There are literally hundreds of billionaires.

The state still owns some critical things, but is that enough to make it communist? Its not everything and you can have state ownership and still have a ruling class that has control of the means of production which it uses to its own advantage.

The PRC asserts that they follow a modified Marxism-Leninism. Though the ideology is full of hypocrisies and plain old nonsense. For instance, they refer to themselves as a "people's democratic dictatorship" that is "led by the working class". This irrationality extends into their stated foreign policy approach of "peaceful rise" & respecting sovereignty, a "socialist market economy" in which independent labor unions are illegal & violently suppressed, and anything else you can think of.

They're basically totalitarian gaslighters. See how hysterical the PRC gets whenever any nation indicates that they will protect Taiwan from violent invasion. You can see an obsession with narrative control that borders on pathological.