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The term Tankie has a clear definition that Cowbee likes to ignore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those > who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the > occurrence of the events thereof.
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All revolutions are authoritarian. It’s the forceful dispossession and usurping of one class by another. That’s inherently going to be violent and based on authority derived from the workers.
And we all know that the imperialists of the world will never let a communist project exist in peace, they will assault it with never ending attempts to destroy and undermine and isolate it. So until there’s global communism and no imperialism, an ongoing authoritarian state is required to protect the communist project.
I get what you're saying, but I think this is ceding too much ground by more or less accepting their definition of "authoritarian" (when the government does something I don't like).
It's much cleaner to argue that all states have police, all states restrict speech, all states try to disrupt those who wish to overthrow them, etc., and then ask how China is different along those lines than the U.S. or any other "good" state.
every state in human history is authoritarian, and to be non-authoritarian is to not-exist and give up
It has more to do with the fact that the state is, quite literally, the ability to do legalized violence. Not that these people have any actual coherent understanding of political science. The state, in order to be a state, must have and maintain a monopoly on violence.
The goal is to work towards a future where no violence from anyone is legal. Liberals don't believe such a thing is ever possible, therefore any communist who is using the state to attempt to achieve such a goal is therefore lying.
This is also where the difference between most Left-Coms and MLs lies. Left-Coms believe that you can simply abolish the state and the commodity-form wholesale, while MLs believe that the state apparatus must first be harnessed for the benefit of the working class, as it is a tool, to control violence and use it against the bourgeois (and more importantly not against the working class).
Anarchists (assuming they are principled and not simply liberals larping as anarchists) are on the same side as the Left-coms, they simply believe that a stateless society should be organized around small stateless producers, rather than industrialized economies of scale.
TLDR: Yes, all states are authoritarian, but only ML states exist around the idea that we should using the state apparatus a be moving towards a stateless future, whereas liberal states are more than happy to wallow in the current modern setup forever, as if states are an eternal concept, and not an extremely recent phenomena (relative to humanity).