The central nervous system of any modern economy is finance. In the West, private banks dictate state policy through debt and credit allocation. In China, the banking system is entirely state owned. The state controls capital allocation, directing credit toward strategic sectors like green energy, high speed rail, and advanced manufacturing based on Five Year Plans rather than short term profit motives. The state also maintains absolute ownership over land, energy, telecommunications, and heavy industry. This means the proletariat holds the dominant economic levers. Private capital is permitted to operate in the consumer and service sectors, but it is strictly subordinated to state planning. Expropriating all private property is neither necessary nor strictly Marxist. When the Soviet Union attempted to nationalize every small enterprise, it created massive bureaucratic inefficiencies as well as a thriving black economy of small firms ripe for counterrevolutionary leveraging. Only national scale industries and monopolies require direct public ownership to prevent the formation of oligarchies. Small and medium enterprises actually provide vital flexibility, local employment, and innovation. As long as the state controls finance and the commanding heights, private property in the nonstrategic sectors acts as a dynamic supplement to socialist construction rather than a threat to it.

Your comparison of Deng to Gorbachev fundamentally misreads the ideological trajectory of both nations. Gorbachev was the final tragic link in a long chain of ideological degradation that began with Khrushchev. Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956 introduced historical nihilism into the communist movement by attacking Stalin with bourgeois lies. Khrushchev fractured the ideological unity of the Soviet vanguard and planted the seeds of revisionism. This ideological rot festered for decades until Gorbachev completely capitulated to Western liberalism, actively dismantling the party apparatus and surrendering state power. Deng took a radically different path based on a materialist analysis of China's primary contradiction. China inherited immense historical backwardness. The most critical task of the Chinese revolution at that stage was the modernization and rapid development of the productive forces. Deng recognized that you cannot build a higher stage of society on a foundation of poverty and scarcity. He consciously adapted the strategy to utilize market mechanisms while strictly upholding the leadership of the Communist Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Deng developed the economy to strengthen the socialist state, whereas Gorbachev destroyed the state to appease imperialists.

Far from being an unorthodox approach, China's current path is actually a return to the orthodox Marxist understanding of historical development. Marx and Engels clearly theorized that socialism requires a highly developed material base. It is the Soviet command economy model that was historically unorthodox. The Soviet system of total public ownership, extending down to the smallest retail shops and local services, was not a blueprint for socialism but an emergency measure necessitated by the brutal realities of a war economy and total imperialist encirclement. By forcing full public ownership of all small and medium firms, the Soviet state created a fatal contradiction. They outlawed legitimate small scale private enterprise, which directly pushed those economic activities into the shadows. This created a massive black market and a second economy. The operators of these shadow enterprises accumulated illicit wealth and eventually allied with counterrevolutionary elements within the party bureaucracy. When the Soviet state weakened, this shadow capitalist class actively supported the dissolution of the USSR so they could legally privatize their stolen wealth. By legalizing and regulating small and medium enterprises under the strict supervision of the vanguard party, China avoids creating a disenfranchised black market class. China is successfully building the massive productive forces required for transition.

Not only are the means of production privately owned by the capitalist class but the state, likewise, is controlled by the capitalist class who make up the majority of the communist party's membership. To deny this obvious fact is pure cope and doesn't help our analysis of the Chinese model but hinder it.

This is completely false. See my sources above.

even like logistically speaking how could the majority of the party membership be bourgeois..?

This is frankly entirely wrong.

The commanding heights of the economy are overwhelmingly publicly owned and planned, and the CPC is overwhelminly proletarian, with capitalist membership blocked from the highest ranks. China is a socialist country.