The author is mostly talking about Soviet Communism, China pre-1976, etc. in which the government owns everything there is to own. The China of today isn't "centrally planning a whole society". It's a society in which the government owns a much larger amount of assets, than, say, the United States (as measured as a percentage of the country's national income). On that metric, it's just further along the scale compared to Northern European social democracies (where the government also owns many more assets than in the United States). I think it's a great mistake to assume that just because the government owning everything doesn't work, the government owning anything is also bad.