As others have pointed out, I think you're confusing tokenism on certain issues (specifically those mentioned in the Official Left Curriculum) for progress in general.

The fact that you couldn't fire a woman is surely overshadowed by the fact that most women still had very limited freedoms. And I think anyone who believes there was no casting couch or droit de cadre oppression of women in Maoist China may not have been looking at what was really going on.

We don't know what a non-Communist China would have looked like. But is China really any more progressive now than Taiwan or Japan, which seem like reasonable reference points?

It's certainly true that China is working towards Green energy. But China is also producing vast clouds of lethal pollution. Which is the true China?

The basic Marxist problem is that Marx took industrialistion as a given and simply wanted to give the keys to the factories and mines to the workers.

So far as I know he never questioned industrialisation as a goal. And he didn't lay down any specifics for dealing with predatory or sociopathic personalities.

Therefore, Stalin and Mao.

Now, it's acknowledged often enough that while capitalist societies have some diversity of power, even when they become oligarchies, socialist and communist societies always seem to revert to kingdoms. The king may appear to wear factory fatigues - sometimes. But the essential dynamic is even more feudal than that of Western cultures. (Although usefully, the West exports its feudalisms elsewhere while giving its citizens some extra benefits - rather like Rome.)

The point of the article remains - in the limit, feudal and industrial societies converge, and citizens in both labour for their masters rather than for themselves.