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Holcombe gives various explanations why medieval China is considered medieval/feudal he kinda uses this interchangeably, we should remain at feudal so widely, the Marxist historiography and we aren't talking about the "muh cultural marxism" pol-tier meme, but actual Marxism of the tankies of th PRC is just one of them. Really he doesn't do much else, basically strawmanning with this, and marginalizing all the reasons why they actually do it.
He follows the typical pattern of researchers, he reaches a couple generations back to an idea, then he gets the data, reshuffles the emphasis' in order to present that old idea in a new light. The end result of the compulsory publication, they have to justify why it's worth to spend money on them and their research.
He doesn't have a term for this new miraculous system the Tangs established, he just shifts the emphasis onto trade and not aristocratic land ownership. But did China had market economy? He can't step forward and saying she had, because she hadn't.
See there are several economical systems, one of them feudalism as Turkeybernd pointed it out ofc it still stands that it was also societal, political, military system. For example palace ecnomoy, where the the production was done by specialized communities who sent the goods to the palace and that redistributed those goods between the communities. Or there's market economy, where the basis of the economy is the exchange of goods via markets (from the places of production the goods are brought to markets where they get redistributed and taken to the place use/consumption). And there's feudalism, where the goods are produced and used locally. Or - according to the Marxist idea - there were the classic slavery (they citing the antiquity, for example the Roman Empire, or the Greek poleis) where the production was done by slaves and everyone else was lived off their work ofc this Marxist idea here comes nonsense, all through antiquity basically everywhere the free commoners did their fair share in the economy.
But in medieval Europe - where undeniably feudalism was the economical system - slavery was a thing, and trade (both domestic and foreign) in most of its history was a common practice. With little mental gymnastics and shifting emphasis, we could say that starting from renaissance, Medieval Europe wasn't that much medieval.