No they opened up themselves to foreign investment, while maintaining centralized authority over the commanding heights of their economy. You can google Hillary Clinton whining about how we allowed capital to flow into China but they never liberalized their economy.
People’s lives improved because they had access to vast amount of surplus capital from US buisness interests who had more loyalty to profits then their own country Anyone’s life will get better when a giant dump truck of money backs up onto their lawn. That’s not capitalism, that’s just wealth.
But instead of allowing profits from the newly developed industrial capacity courtesy of said foreign investment to flow to private individuals vast amounts of profits were invested in infrastructure and social supports to develop their own productive forces in a process called “equal development.”
It took communists in china 60 years to go from the “century of humiliation” dominated by western and Japanese imperialism to industrial powerhouse and the world’s largest economy, just as it too the USSR 30 years to turn an agrarian backwater into a space faring industrial superpower.