At the end of the Sino-Japanese War/the Long March/the Revolution, the PRC holds the entire mainland but it does it without any cohesive program of industrialization.
At the end of the Great Patriotic War, the USSR economy is fully mobilized and, critically, there is no civil economy to demobilize into. It wasn't there before, it isn't there now. There's no systemic alternative to the mechanisms of central command and singular objectives.
That's it. Military spending is a net negative to the overall economy, but the mobilization spending prioritization and control model is net _destructive_. (To a large extent, the US mammonism outbreak with the Reagan presidency was an initially cynical effort to mask the consequences of Vietnam and the unaccountable Cold War nuclear build up/build out on the overall economy so no one would start asking the rich to pay for it.)
The PRC has avoided this. You can put it down to the Korean War -- which destroyed so much of the core PLAN cadre in obviously tech-dependent ways that "army as a tool of policy" wasn't even considered for half a century -- or basic good sense or anything you like, really, but that's the core policy difference. China was in a position to create a civil economy; the USSR was not.
At the end of the Sino-Japanese War/the Long March/the Revolution, the PRC holds the entire mainland but it does it without any cohesive program of industrialization.
At the end of the Great Patriotic War, the USSR economy is fully mobilized and, critically, there is no civil economy to demobilize into. It wasn't there before, it isn't there now. There's no systemic alternative to the mechanisms of central command and singular objectives.
That's it. Military spending is a net negative to the overall economy, but the mobilization spending prioritization and control model is net _destructive_. (To a large extent, the US mammonism outbreak with the Reagan presidency was an initially cynical effort to mask the consequences of Vietnam and the unaccountable Cold War nuclear build up/build out on the overall economy so no one would start asking the rich to pay for it.)
The PRC has avoided this. You can put it down to the Korean War -- which destroyed so much of the core PLAN cadre in obviously tech-dependent ways that "army as a tool of policy" wasn't even considered for half a century -- or basic good sense or anything you like, really, but that's the core policy difference. China was in a position to create a civil economy; the USSR was not.