I think I get what you mean especially with the part about, “It’s like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year.” I’m not familiar with that term itself, but the notion of history stopping for some people, I think, is an important point and relates to the larger point you’re making about China’s current state as well as about those who fetishize theory. I want to choose my words carefully lest I sound like someone who is saying the history does not matter or that we can just abandon all past experiences and methods and pretend they’re irrelevant (an equally silly notion in its own right) but it does appear like some people are effectively stopping after a certain point in history and saying, “This is where socialism [or communism, whichever you prefer to call it for the sake of this example] was halted and from here on out, it has been a failure.” A notion that appears to happen both in the kind of instance you’re describing and in other instances, such as people who are getting their feet wet in theory and who say AES states are “not real socialism/communism.” I’m not sure the motives are the same in every case (I think for the people getting their feet wet, for example, there is a real fear of supporting existing socialist projects because they’re still in this place of viewing them through the lens of imperialist vilification).

Either way, we come back to what you say about “start looking at what’s happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit”, whether it is for China or another country. I know in my own case, I’ve adopted a stance that goes something like: “I don’t know and until I do, I will not act like I do.” So when someone comes to me with empire news perspectives on a historically vilified country, rather than saying “it’s a perfect place, don’t question it” or saying “yeah, real socialism hasn’t been tried” or saying “it was good and then revisionists ruined it,” I will say, “I don’t know.” If I get to a point I understand enough about the details of its conditions through sources I can trust, then I can begin to grapple with the day to day realities of it and I can talk to people about those realities rather than through generalizations that obscure the conditions. But reaching that point is, I think, especially for those of us who live immersed in empire news locales, a difficult thing to do. And it is very easy for us to instead go by the western chauvinist mindset of, “I understand the ‘lesser’ country better than they understand themselves.” That is what those of us growing up in the imperial core have been socialized to do.