It's closer to a highly regulated semi-free market like Singapore, many European countries etc.
China is interesting in that they seem to take a more data-orientated decision making process when it comes to determining areas where free-market like behaviors would increase efficiency while keeping strategic capabilities under public funding (despite the efficiency losses).
I think most other governments manage this balance poorly, in recent decades mostly tending to over-privatize things like utilities and infrastructure.
If China manages to continue on it's path of market regulation and paying attention to health of competition etc (it's recent work on giving the SAMR teeth) they are going to be in a very strong position in the coming decades while others play catchup after the privatisation overcorrection.
People seem to forget that free markets -require- strong regulation. The tending towards deregulation in US markets has lead to a serious degradation of market competitiveness and thus freedom.
My hope is the success of China will drive Western economies to do better so that we can say that democracy is at least as good as autocracy but preferably better. But to do that we need to stop throwing stones from glass houses and actually get down to the business of matching them.