[PapaBear3625]

The word which describes China's current situation is "oligarchy", where an entrenched elite runs the country for its own benefit. This increasingly describes the US as well, but that's another story.

The Chinese "princelings" are effectively the new nobility of China, each guarding his own feudal turf.

[Little Ray]

Part of my view of China is shaped by a historian who called the establishment of Communism in China the “Peasant Dynasty.”
From a SF/Future History point of view, I see an empire ruled by an emperor called a Chairman and served by Ministers drawn from a nobility called the Commissioners.
Or something along that line, anyway.