USSR was a totally centrally planned economy, everything based on central planning. China seems to be combining elements of long term planning with elements of capitalism... it does seem a more successful mix than the USSR ever was?
In our travels to both countries, the symptoms of a centrally planned economy are visible everywhere. One of the most obvious characteristics is how manufacturing/sourcing of particular categories of goods are centralized into one city or region. That's still mostly true in China despite their attempts to mix in some free enterprise. For example, the Ningbo region has the lion's share of hydraulics and similar manufacturing. Shenzhen/Guangdong Province is the clear center of electronics. One of the cities is their finance capital (can't remember which right now), another is textiles, etc. They may be blurring the lines a bit from the past but even today if you seek sources of a specific product from China, the companies that produce those products are almost always clustered in a common geographic region. Once you know where one is, you know where most of them will be.
My wife's travels in Russia revealed the same thing. Regions are still largely devoted to a formerly assigned activity.
This structure may yield some efficiencies but it's very fault INtolerant, as recently demonstrated with China's "zero COVID" regional lockdowns. Exports of entire product segments slowed to a trickle depending upon which region was locked down at the moment. We experienced this firsthand. We had samples of a certain kind of pump ordered from three potential vendors so we could qualify multiple suppliers. A "zero COVID" lockdown hit the region and two of the vendors simply shut down. We continued communicating with their staff from their apartments via email and WeChat but they were quite candid, saying "we have no idea when we will be allowed back to the factory and cannot say when we can ship the prototypes". Fortunately in this specific case one of the three potential vendors was barely outside the "zone" and was able to ship on time. But this really sensitized us to how a regional "problem", COVID or otherwise, could turn off exports of entire categories of products overnight.
Caveat emptor!
Interesting observations. - The same thing (concentration of industry) tends to happen here at home too, e.g. Silicon Valley, or Detroit, or ... - you get an ecosystem for making electronics, with all the right suppliers and people in the same area - it almost has to happen automatically as people seek it out (e.g. how did we all end up on the EEVblog?)
Perhaps the central planners just take it into account in the first place, and intentionally build out areas to cater to a specific type of industry. Either way, I'm not sure if it is a good, bad, or indifferent thing to be doing.
Where central planning / communism typically has fallen down in the past is by not providing incentives (i.e. you can't get rich building up a successful company) - but that aspect is something that China (and Russa too) seem to have adopted in spades.
I guess it is a bit like the situation with programming languages: all the different ones crib the best ideas from the others, so in the long run they seem to be converging!
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