You’re hastily jumping to the conclusion that the new thing is the same as the old thing just because it has some similarities.

Your example of religious schisms gives the game away, really, because every major religious schism I can think of did bring significant qualitative changes in the social organization of the societies that underwent them. For example, the ideological and philosophical basis of settlement in the United States was founded on the new sects of Protestantism that followed Calvinist influences. Their attitudes toward labor, property, the question of slavery, and many other political matters was distinct from the results you’d expect out of Catholic settlers, or any other religion. And that’s a difference in religion which, from a materialist perspective, is not even the primary thing that makes history move, but part of the ideological superstructure that serves to maintain the economic relations in a given society.

In the case of China: no, the “authoritarian uniparty” is not simply the new owning class. That’s not how the party works and it’s also not how class works. In fact, the statement “functionally you don’t have a say” is probably the most incorrect statement you can make about SWCC, because it’s a very practical system that, while it made a lot of compromises for the sake of reforms and opening up, it has always listened to input from the people. The way the entire CPC is structured is designed for that purpose and it gives its members ample room to have a say over the way things are run.

To think that the “authoritarian uniparty” was truly some kind of new owning class, you’d have to first explain how a political party that has its origins (and present support) in the peasantry and workers, comes to become the opposite thing entirely, a group that controls capital for the sake of producing more capital. That isn’t even a plausible statement to make of the ruling parties in Western imperialist countries: their ruling parties are organs of their respective ruling classes, international imperialist capitalists who use their states to increase their profits.

Is Xi Jinping answering to Chinese billionaires, structuring policy to serve their interests? And if he is, why do the billionaires allow the CPC to make each 5 year plan and the policies chosen to implement them based on the input from millions of party members, instead of receiving a policy plan from a billionaire operated think tank like they do in the West? Is it really all a big conspiracy?

Some resources:

CGTN: Who Runs the CPC

China has Billionaires