Well the point here is not that China is cool and based actually, but that people definitely did some lying on this point and those same people definitely think it means that any and all forms of communism are authoritarian and there is no alternative to capitalism.
There has to be some percentage of people who let this be the thing that radicalises them, and I don't want to hear any doomer takes about how these people are impossible to reach. I've heard loads of stories over the years of this or that particular moment being the moment that snapped someone out of their fascist sympathies.