A planned economy has been tried. However, even after removing all market mechanisms, corruption amongst the party managed to shatter the union.
As much as Deng is hated, he managed to set the foundation of a mixed economy, which, as we can see by the great growth of China, was probably the correct thing to do.
Later adaptations by the CCP managed to incorporate precautions to prevent internal corruptions, and furthermore, bourgeoisie corruption to avoid the dissolution of China and shock therapy.
Furthermore, after the dissolution of the USSR, many communist parties followed China in pursue of a mixed economy, leading to growth and the betterment of society as a whole.
That’s not to say that China doesn’t have its flaws. Particularly in its neutrality and lack of action internationally.
Mixed economy is necessary in the first stage of socialism. Here’s how China’s academy of science sees it:
Engels was already saying as much in Principles of communism:
Earlier socialist experiments had periods of mixed economies too, for example the USSR with Lenin’s NEP(new economic policy). However, these early socialist experiments made the mistake of ending this phase way too early, including China under Mao. It’s only after the Khrushchevist opportunists took over the Soviet Union that China realized the soviet approach was misguided on multiple points and decided to start over this early phase of socialism under Deng Xiaoping, with the intention to let it run its course to the end this time.
One major flaw of the Soviet way of ending the mixed economy phase as soon as possible and directly switching to a nationally owned command economy is that it forced them in a position of constantly butting heads with a capitalist world at the peak of it’s power with a primitive, still burgeoning socialism (remember that the USSR and Mongolia had been the only socialist countries in the world until the end of world war 2).
The fact that the world’s bourgeoisie wouldn’t be able to access the soviet market regardless of what they did meant there was little downside for the capitalists to impose full embargo on the Soviets and refuse to share technology. Not only did this severely curb the Soviet’s ability to get anything from foreign countries (which really didn’t help during the famine), it meant the USSR was constantly on the back-foot trying to re-invent technologies that had already been invented in the west, causing Soviet technology to be perpetually behind despite the high quality of their science. Plus, being denied access to such a huge market made the capitalist world especially mad and warmongering, particularly since, with capitalists being denied access to the Soviet market, bombing the USSR wouldn’t destroy any private property belonging to any capitalists nor disturb any of their businesses.
With its Socialism with Chinese characteristics model, China use capitalism’s own contradictions against it. When China opened it’s market to foreign investment, the huge potential market and cheap labor pool was just too much too pass up, the capitalists probably knew that China was still socialist and that implanting these humongous manufacturing capabilities in China with all the technical knowledge this imply would strengthen China at their expense no less, but whether they knew that or not didn’t matter, the capitalists needed to go to China to maximize their profits. This also works to temper western aggression, with so much of the capitalist’s manufacturing capabilities based in China and so much of their business and supply chains going through China, including the ones allowing them to arm their military, the capitalists are quite reluctant to go to war against China despite all their warmongering rhetoric, that’s also both why they’re so desperate to get their businesses out of China and why they can’t do it: they need to get out of China so that they can bomb China without breaking their own toys, but none of them want to be the first to get out of China because they know that if one gets out but the others stay, the one who got out is gonna get out-competed by the ones who stayed.
and yet liberals argue that a planned economy is just intrinsically worse than neoliberalism…
Very educational.
You mentioned that the PRC under Deng learned after the failiures of the USSR when Khrushchevist opportunists took over. However, I don’t see the correlation between that and a rushed transition into a planned economy.
From my understanding, the accession to power of Khrushchev was a wake up call that prompted the Chinese to examine not only Khrushchev’s revisionism but earlier mistakes from before Khrushchev as well. Before that, China had a tendency to just do what the USSR recommended them to do with minimal consideration like most of the socialist block was doing.
But someone more read than me on the PRC’s history would be better able to tell you about these events than I can.