Yes, I think new scholarship from China specialists generally agree that one of the primary aims for China in the Korean war was to achieve CCP domestic objectives through mass mobilization. One of my professors from undergrad studied this exact topic as his main research area and wrote a couple of books about it.

Remember of course that the civil war had just ended. In 1948 the PLA controlled only the city of Harbin and rural areas in north China, from about Hebei up to the Soviet border. After a series of conventional PLA attacks on major northern cities like Shenyang and Jinan, GMD resistance collapsed rapidly. The PRC was proclaimed October 1 1949 and GMD stragglers were finally cleaned up in mid-1950. The state that the CCP inherited was an absolute mess. The GMD fabi yuan was in the middle of an inflationary spiral that saw the cost of living in Shanghai increase almost 20x from September to December of 1948, and this was after a currency reissue that July which exchanged the new yuan with the old yuan at a rate of 3 million to 1. At the time of the CCP takeover many transactions were conducted through barter.

The first few of years of CCP control was focused on reconstruction, with political reform temporarily postponed in the interest of rebuilding the economy after more than a decade of war and economic turmoil. Capitalists were left in charge of their factories, foreigners were left in their international zones, and bureaucrats and policemen remained at their posts. Industrial disputes between workers and owners were kept to a minimum for the time being.

It's not an accident that the Korean War coincided with the early phases of China's transition into a planned economy and the associated political mass movements that accompanied it. One mass movement was directed at foreigners: the 'Resist America, Aid Korea' movement. This was overtly focused on the ongoing Korean war, and it led to the expulsion of essentially the entire foreign community in China by 1951 and the seizure of their assets. The war coincided with other mass campaigns, including one against GMD 'counterrevolutionaries,' another against CCP bureaucrats known as the 'Three Anti' movement (anti-corruption, anti-waste, anti-obstructionism), and yet another called the 'Five Anti' movement launched to attack the urban upper / middle class (industrialists, managers, etc.).

The overall purpose of these mass mobilizations was to break the power of the old landowning elite in the countryside and the power of private industrialists, both foreign and Chinese, in the cities, and by the end of 1952 basically all of these goals had been accomplished. It set the stage for the first PRC five year plan covering 1953-1957. Large scale implementation of central planning for industries, and cooperative farming for agriculture followed starting in 1955. The Korean War was instrumental in sustaining the fever pitch of politics from 1950 to 1952.

To quote from my old prof's book:

...the Korean crisis offered the CCP leadership potential opportunities. In evaluating how the Korean crisis might influence China, Mao and his fellow CCP leaders could clearly sense that by firmly and successfully fully confronting the "U. S. imperialist aggression" in Korea and Taiwan, they would be able to translate the tremendous pressure from without into dynamics that would help enhance the Chinese people's revolutionary momentum while legitimizing the CCP's authority as China's new ruler. This would help establish the foundation for Mao's grand plans to transform China's old state and society into a new socialist country.

See:

Mao's China and the Cold War, Chen Jian

China's Road to the Korean War, Chen Jian