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.

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.

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.

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.

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.