Why does China brand itself as being communist when it's arguably not any more communist than Japan or most social democracies in Europe?
General Motors sold more cars in China than in the United States in the first half of 2010, and China now accounts for one-quarter of the company’s global sales. That seems like a lot of capitalism for a country that calls itself communist. How communist is China, really?
Not very. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, China has all but abandoned the tenets of classical marxism, including collective ownership of the means of production. Nowadays, just about everything is at least partly privatized. Whereas the Chinese Communist Party under Chairman Mao owned every factory and farm in the nation, the economy is now a patchwork of public and private businesses. Schools can also be state-run or private. Entitlements have also been cut way back since the days of true communism, with minimal state-provided health care and social security programs. We associate socialist countries with confiscatory tax rates, but taxes aren’t especially high in China. (Chinese corporations pay 25 percent and individuals between 5 and 45 percent—numbers roughly comparable to those in the United States.)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/07/how-communist-is-china-anyway.html
Is there any advantage in doing so and did the Chinese government tell why it insists on referring itself as a socialist or communist government?