Paul Krugman is a Nobel prize winning economist, and The New York Times columnist. He is a famous liberal. Heck, the name of his blog is The Conscience of a Liberal. Here is a recent article he wrote to criticize Chinese government's interventions in the market: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/opinion/paul-krugman-bungling-beijings-stock-marketshtml.html? From this, one can get a sense of the difference between a western liberal and a Chinese "communist".