Where does the Communisty Party of China fit into the ideological spectrum?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

This might be a hot take: the CCP is misunderstood throughout the Western world because pundits and social analysts fail to recognize that left-wing social movements in "the Third World" primarily operated as nationalist vehicles for modernization. There's nothing incoherent about the CCP if it is understood that it garnered mass public support on the basis of its promise to modernize China in a manner aligned with social justice; as a result, the CCP attracted a large number of devoted public officials who were "reformist" or "heterodox" Communists. Many of them were purged but the CCP retained a surprising heterogeneity throughout the Mao years, a heterogeneity that came into full bloom in the years preceding the Tienanmen Square student protests. If anything, the Tienanmen Square protests evidence the CCP's heterogeneity: the Internationale was sung throughout the protests, the protests attracted large segments of the proletariat, who mobilized for the ability to form independent unions, the vast majority of students and workers professed loyalty to the CCP while advocating for democracy.

If the CCP is understood as a modernizing nationalist party of the left, its actions from Mao to Jinping fit a coherent rubric of constant experimentation rooted in the drive to achieve modernity on its own terms. In this regard, it has largely achieved its objectives but it has ignored alarming social trends and widening gulfs of inequality at its own peril. I'm not going to deliver the usual critique of the CCP, a critique that I largely agree with, because that can be found anywhere; it has certainly adhered to a ruthless form of state-based based development and that has remained a constant but the developmentalist or modernizing mode of politics remains relevant and I think it should be understood on its own terms rather than fitted and slotted according to European notions of politics.

Edit: I'd note that the Latin American left largely fits into this mode of politics.