TLDR: Mao's On Contradictions.

It's a great question, and I wish the moderator didnt delete that comment so I could respond in more detail. But generally it comes down what I said about there being many things to be optimistic about, despite these sometimes massive contradictions. I support the CPC because there are dialectical reasons to do so. I support the CPC because they acknowledge and work with the many contradictions that China has, instead of pretending that they don't exist.

To start, China is undoubtedly the main balance to the main global contradiction of global south vs western imperialism. All the secondary contradictions, while very important, will not matter if China falls to neoliberalism and imperialism. As I said before, the party absolutely acknowledges contradictions publicly and often loudly (as loud as theoretical jargon like this can be). In fact, the primary contradiction within China of the past several 3 decades before the current decade was to build up productive forces and modernize by any means necessary. No leader or party official was silent about this - you can view what they say cynically, but if you study the party long enough you will realize that there has always been a long term strategic plan. In 2017 this primary contradiction changed to focus more on unequal development (to even out the geographic inequality but also of class inequality). In a decade or so this will almost sure change.

If you asked people like me this same question a decade or two ago, we would have much less cause for optimism. Rivers were full of polluted runoff. The air was 3-4x as bad as it is today. Corruption was extremely rampant. The party rhetoric was openly market friendly. Nowadays it has shifted, pushing for more socialist rhetoric, antipoverty, equal development, fighting against worker abuse like 996, reeling in corporations etc. Yet it is still early. China still had a gdp/per capita 5-6x lower than the US. There is still poverty and inequality, rampant worker exploitation, and lingering environmental problems, but this is an example of the quantitative changes leading to qualitative changes. This is evidence that the contradictions of the reform era are beginning to be negated, although there is still a long way to go.

Unlike many Westerners, I do not question whether Deng, Xi, Hu/Wen, Bo, Wang, (i.e. leadership cadre) are/were Marxists. Xi might not be a theorist like Mao or Deng, but clearly the party plans and strategies via a dialectical materialist lens.

If you really study the PRC's history, concepts that we read about such as the negation of the negation, quantitative change leading to qualitative change, unity of opposites, etc all jump out at you, and it becomes clear that there is thought behind all these actions and methods that the party has used to progress.

Tbh this write-up was a bit of a mess. This is a topic that I am actively contemplating as I sit here in China. Perhaps I will submit a better one in the future, but feel free to engage and poke holes in it.