> What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)?

Soviets had more hardcore ideologues at helm most of the times until SU dissolution. They hardly allowed their ideology to be diluted without challenge, which made plans infeasible without real time feedback. China's Mao era was somewhat similar to that. After Mao, during fight between Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, realistic faction came on top with famous Deng saying "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice". Also China does experimentation at province and city level, with people succeeding promoting to national level, containing pitfalls of bad policy.

So China introduced market competition at the political level and at the economic level.

And they did it while remaining authoritarian. Incredible.

highly meritocratic system all the way from bottom to top. incredible indeed. in china you start as a low level official managing a village, if you succeed - you're promoted to town etc. they keep detailed records of your performance in school from kindergarten and a comprehensive dossier is compiled to evaluated by party officials. that means you will never have a nincompoop in charge at any level.

maybe chinese nationals / or ccp members can correct or add some things.

> they keep detailed records of your performance in school from kindergarten and a comprehensive dossier

this also means you want your record pristine. And it is also why officials cover up problems rather than report it up.

But their current success to out-maneuver the US in terms of trade, as well as capacity, is testament to perhaps the success of such a system. I do recall there was a massive purge on corruption over the past decade(s), which is probably helped a lot. This did not happen in soviet russia.

That massive corruption purge is mainly Xi purging rival factions like Shangai and Jiang. Sure, it also targeted corrupt officials, but main target is rival factions in consolidating Xi grip on power. There isn't lot of taboo about corruption if you align with the correct faction.

And also stay aligned with the correct faction. This also provides golden handcuffs: should one's alignment change, past misdeeds will instantly be remembered.

Rooting out corruption in russia is simply not possible when biggest thief is at the top of the pyramid (absolute minimum stolen from russian nation is on the order of 100 billions $$ stashed all over the world, but its hard to count when its spread across many 'representatives').

He also actively promotes corruption of his underlings, but the important point is - within hard limits of their position. Get greedy and overstep that and either modern gulag or window for you. Good luck saying to the rest of population 'don't steal!'.

Xi is not flaunting his billion dollar mansions with golden toilets or megayachts while his kids grow up in Switzerland, is he.

Meanwhile the USA now has an openly corrupt president (openly favors his pal Elon Musk's companies in his daily speeches, lets Musk shut down the same agencies that regulate Musk's companies, etc) who is shielded by his party from impeachment.

China is starting to look quite well run by comparison.

If you appear to succeed- all that is needed is a face of success and connections to others who appear to succeed.

How does this differ from the US or western Europe?

You can express that the emperor is naked in europe, without the emperor sending you to prison, thus guarantee a constant churn and renewal, that leaves behind the cherished product of science - something more truthish.

Competition allows for the ‘creative destruction’ of inefficient industries. See Tesla leapfrogging GM and the other companies. Apple and Microsoft jumping over IBM.

Stuff like that can’t happen if you have protected national giants.

It is amusing that Mao's fatal flaw was adherence to a foreign economic theory.

Argentinas economy is a mess because of a long history of corruption. The CCP embraces markets while also having state ownership of everything by basically acting as venture capital funding different companies combined with heavy subsidies. So the 5 year plans are for signaling for which industries are going to get funding in the near future. My understanding is that this does have a pretty big impact and funding priorities change pretty drastically based off these plans.

Not to mention the orders of magnitude of difference in population capital and that the people of Argentina are not under a regime that promotes basically slave labor for the benefit of their economy. Even if they did I don’t think they’d be able to produce as much just because they don’t have enough people.

That video is pretty… weak. Argentina can’t be looked at on a GDP graph and say “oh yeah let’s find some random country that’s similar in this graph”. Most of Argentina’s problems are self inflicted sabotage. The graphs are also very misleading in the video, not only in the axis scales.

It's about the execution. The plan is just the first step.

Basically, China is centralized politically and decentraliced economically. The soviet centralized everything... even meat prices, a recipe for disaster.

They plan the outcome, but let the governing to the different provinces and the implementation to the (mostly) private sector. These actors are forced to compete, among other things, via export discipline that cannot be faked.

And somehow, despite facing the same corruption and cronyism problems we do in the west, they seem to get better results.

It's much more just population. Rapid population growth and then a one child policy has left China with a population bulge. Right now that bulge is 25-60ish which gives China a large amount of workers compared to children and the elderly. In 20-30 years that's going to switch and they will have a large amount of retirees supported by a relatively small amount of workers.

Free market capitalism and soviet state socialism or communism is just editorial masturbation. Regardless of the economic system, the everyday tasks are done by regular humans. The system can organize them but if they don't want to do the work, the work won't get done. There is no magic system for that.

Over a decade ago, I worked in a public hospital with a really tight budget. The Pneumology section was clean, orderly and provided service to patients as they came with no waiting time. The service in the building nearby could well fit in the definitions of crimes against humanity. Same hospital, same financing, same system, just a different boss.

nice anecdote. but how do you explain systemic differences in general if you really believe the way you organize stuff doesnt matter?

The system is responsible for making people want to do work. Communists believed that ideology alone would be enough, and the capitalists appealed to people's own selfishness.

The difference in effectiveness between these two strategies is the difference between the richest countries in the world and famines that killed like 100M people.

The early industrialization 5 year plans actually worked better for the Soviets than the Chinese, and I think it comes down to execution? Stalin being the more numerate psychopath?

The last 30-40 years it's different, the Chinese have navigated market liberalization and transitioned from copying to leading in a number of areas, while still having a central planning aspect. It could be that some amount of central planning is preferable to pure ideological communism or capitalism.

China to a large extent is following the Japanese and South Korean playbooks, to the point where the Chinese financial system runs under the concept of window guidance invented by the Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_guidance

The question is whether or not this blows up in China’s face when they stop accurately picking winners. We are already seeing the property bubble collapse in a manner similar to Japan’s.

> the question is whether or not this blows up in China’s face

Japan didn't "blow up" due to picking wrong. The US and allies negotiated the value of the yen up (the plaza accords) when the trade imbalance started to rack up against the US. This popped japan's bubble, which ultimately caused their lost decade.

China, on the other hand, would be unlikely to sign any sort of similar treaty with the US. Their property bubble collapsed, but i dont think to the same extend as the japanese one. Not to mention that it was triggered by gov't, so it popped earlier than japan's one in the lifecycle - therefore, it must be the case that it's less bad.

https://old.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/rvid0x/why_did_japan... has some details in the comments.

I think there are different ways of defining bad. In Tokyo in 1990, the ratio of median house price to median income was 15. In Shanghai when the bubble popped, that figure was above 40, and even today it is at 36.

To put this in perspective, San Fransisco, a city considered to have a housing crisis, has a ratio of 9.

Yeah, but the mortgage rate in China is around 3%. Individual income taxes are under 10% [0]. And there's your multiplier for affordability comparisons.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/blog/us-china-tax-policy/

IIRC the Soviets got that done with a lot of help from the US.

The Soviets were insanely successful: From the 1920s to 1960s they raised the USSR to space age, industrialized it to become the 2nd superpower, won a world war, upgraded citizens from village huts to apartments, from being barefoot to cars and subways.

What 'went wrong' was the economic war that Kennedy admn. started to starve the USSR of GDP by starting an arms and space race. The USSR did not bite the space race bait, but arms race was impossible to not participate. So it did. Then in the 1970s, the US started an economic warfare against the USSR with the help of its Gulf allies by manipulating oil prices. That wasn't enough either, so Reagan started another arms race. In the end all of that combined, crippled the USSR and it went bankrupt.

The US also went bankrupt, but it was able to delay it for ~15 more years by printing money and pumping it into the stock market and real estate thanks to the reserve currency status of the dollar. That came crashing down in 2008. The US did some more of the same and dragged it a decade and half more and here we are, where everything is finally crashing down.

China avoided most of that economic warfare by sitting on the sidelines and taking lessons. Sometime a decade ago, it passed the threshold of being too well-rounded and large to fail. To the point that it became a driving engine of the world economy, but backed with actual goods and services instead of the financial voodoo that the US built everything on.

> Basically, is such 5 year plans a recipe for success

Yes, if your country can keep the private interests and capitalists under control. Otherwise, they derail every plan to maximize their profit by siphoning off state resources for little actual progress. Like how the last US administration's 'build back better' plan was derailed.

Some other factors -

In 1916 the communists dud not want to take over Russia. In 1917, Lenin said they should take the opportunity to take over Russia, and wait for Germany to become a left wing government, the real revolution. This did not happen, big business at the 1933 Geheimtreffen decided to back a right wing government in Germany, and the divided left was pushed aside by a united right when the Catholic Center party signed the Enabling Act.

Russia knew from 1917 it needed political winds in the west, but they blew the other way. Continental Europe invaded Russia in 1941.

Then in 1953, Khrushchev shifted capital spending to consumer spending, one of the main blows to the Sividt economy which was humming along from 1933 to 1953.

Karl Marx basically said communist revolutions can't succeed in backwards countries, only the biggest and most advanced countries.

Good points. Though, the Soviet attempt has been extremely successful in many ways. We owe the social state we have in modern society to the Soviets succeeding in establishing all those practices and programs and showing that they can be done. In the 1930s the capital was doing incessant propaganda saying how social programs would cause a society to collapse. Soviet union proved all of them wrong and it became impossible to prevent implementation of the modern social state we have today.

> Yes, if your country can keep the private interests and capitalists under control.

how come in your scenario, the state can do no wrong then?

Every organization can do wrong. However the state is the tool of the society, and its far better than handing things over to unaccountable, sociopathic private profiteers who stop at nothing to maximize their hoards of wealth made up of imaginary numbers that live in the voodoo-like financial system of today.

Soviets might just really be bad at everything. Capitalism didn't work for them either.

If it wasn’t for the Soviets you’d be writing this comment in German :)

And Capitalism does not work for USA or anywhere else either (except for very few people at the very top of the pyramid (scheme…)

They’re good at throwing their population into the meat grinder, sure.

They really did the bulk of Wehrmacht killing on European mainland. But they didn't collapse only due to massive US support, be it in armament, equipment, medicine etc. Absolutely massive. Also it was basically due to bad German planning and preparation for winter, not some soviet strategic brilliance, which was very hard to be found on eastern front, just meatwave after meatwave till german machine gun barrels literally melted.

You could see tons of US equipment during WWII reels on eastern front including heavy machinery, soviets tried desperately to remove such footage (just like photos of soviet soldiers wearing 3+ watches on each hand... err borrowed from friendly locals) but truth has this behavior of seeping back to light.

Capitalism works pretty well in any moral society actually, much better than any other system thats for sure.

What they got wasn't capitalism, it was kleptocracy.

If you look how capitalism is actually implemented, it always has bigger or smaller kleptocratic component.

Of course, but it's the proportion of that that makes all the difference.

I agree. But that might be why soviets are bad at everything. They always get this proportion wrong, in all systems.