This is something I always get in arguments about, whenever I use the word tankie hexbear and grad users argue that its just a term for socialists.
I’ve always just used it to referr to authoritarian communists, i.e, people who unironically support modern russia, and/or oppose ukraine, and think nothing happened to the uyghurs.
their end goal is state capitalism though, so I don’t see the contradiction
Yeah. If they call the current state of China with literal billionaires, communist, then they aren’t communist in any economically defined sense of the world