It wasn't a Soviet command economy. After 1960, Mao hated the Russians.
Mao's economic policy focused on agarian self-reliance rather than the creation of centralized industrial ministries. There was never anything like Gosplan. The Great Leap Forward was a total disaster, and the Cultural Revolution period was merely bad.
I've seen it argued that the economic policies of Mao quite unintentionally helped Deng Xiaoping. One big problem with Gorbachev was that he had to fight the central ministries in Moscow, and once he blew them up, the Soviet economy disintegrated. By contrast, the Chinese economy was never quite as centralized as the Soviet economy, so there weren't huge powerful ministries that Deng Xiaoping had to fight. Also because Chinese communism was more decentralized, it was easier to turn the state-owned enterprises into market entities.
