No Stupid Questions

Oh boy. I don't think I'm remotely an authority on this and I guess I will be downvoted to hell... but here goes nothing

• PRC (China) is an one-party state led by the communist party (CCP, CPC, Gongchandang... whatever); there is no opposition party because they got driven to Taiwan and became today's ROC. That means, present day the CCP is the Chinese government, and the Chinese government is the CCP. There's no real democracy since there's only one party
• China has always been authoritarian for its entire history. CCP started as a far-left authoritarian Marxist/Leninist party, and later became a... Maoist party. I don't think there is any party currently in the world that is Maoist (probably better to keep it that way), although there could be some fringe Marxist/Leninist parties somewhere
• After Mao died and the subsequent mayhem subsided, the successors still hang on to the communist/socialist naming schemes (where the socialism with Chinese characteristics or something came from), but have mostly adapted a blend of state capitalism and free market capitalism models, especially on the economic front. In practice, that means that China is very free-market, but most of the largest companies are either fully or partially owned by the CCP. The past few chairmen before Xi massively tuned down on the authoritarian scale because no one wanted another Mao. Culturally, Marxism is anti-religion so CCP purged a lot of folk religion and Confucianism, so ironically China might be culturally more progressive than their East Asian neighbors...
• Funnily enough, even though there is no democracy, a lot of Chinese emperors/dictators tried to be benevolent dictators. Because China's social contract is kind of like "we give away our freedom but demand prosperity in return". If China ever becomes not prosperous, the people are known to revolt and overthrow the government; happened a dozen or so times in recorded history. So CCP does still have somewhat of an incentive to try and not screw over its people too much
• China did retain some socialism stuff, notably: planned economy in 5-year increments, citizens technically can't own property (but can "lease" for 70 years...), heavily state-sponsored public infrastructure, universal high-quality education... But at the same time China's actual economy is also insanely unequal and highly resembles a free-market, anything goes model. Again, more like the US than anything else
• On the other side of the equation, the lives of the average citizen in China is... surprisingly similar to those in the US, despite everything. It's just that China basically has their own version of everything the "Western world" has, because China's economy and internet are quite walled off. If anything, maybe Chinese citizens have a bit more of a pent-up anger? Since you are thrown into a metaphorical meat-grinder but can't even protest... I think the pent-up anger shows up on Chinese social media a lot if anyone is interested. But that's pretty much it

I'm not a political scientist so I probably missed a lot... but that's the gist I think. If you are asking about how the actual government is organized, I think Wikipedia explained it way better than anyone on Lemmy could, and honestly it is not as exotic as most would think (there are a lot of parallels to governments of most democracies)