This is a consequence I think of the usage of the word 'state', where people cannot see past the state-conflict label which is usually desrcibed as imperialism (because its capitalists using the state to extract commodities from other states). People are misinformed and under educated.

The challenge with 'socialism in one country' as a descriptive is that to me it feels like a myopic lens if used to then describe the international class conflict. As state conflicts throughout history (ignoring things like peasant republic, theocracy, and so on) are usually the learned exploitation of capitalist colonialism, nationalism or imperialism. As uneducated people project the other class/state-conflicts with that 'understanding' they then mischaracter the PRC as "state capitalism" or the USSR as "socialist imperialism".