(1) The public ownership economy is dominant in the ownership structure. From the perspective of ownership structure, the characteristics of "one dominant and two dominant" in China's economic system before the reform are very obvious, which completely conforms to the same standard of traditional planned economy. In China's public ownership economy, according to the degree of public ownership, the ownership of urban industrial economy mainly includes: ownership by the whole people, state ownership and collective ownership; In rural areas, land is mainly owned by the state and rural collectives, but the mandatory unified purchase plan and corresponding production plan of agricultural products issued by the state must be strictly implemented, and it does not have complete collective property rights.

(2) The state adopts direct compulsory administration over economic activities. One of the main signs of the centrally planned economic system is that the state or the central government becomes the core subject in the economic operation, while enterprises become the appendages of the government because they only implement the established production plan. The state mainly regulates and manages economic operation through a certain stage of economic development plan. Through the establishment of a special economic planning department to formulate development plans, and comprehensively control the adoption indicators, planning parameters and actual evaluation of enterprises. And the performance of the enterprise is fully reflected in the completion of the plan and the preference of the authorities. A highly planned command economy requires careful planning of all aspects of economic operation, but due to information problems, planning is often rigid and inflexible.

(3) Economic decision-making power is highly centralized. The state should not only be responsible for the macro allocation of resources, but also plan the income and expenditure of micro-enterprises and individuals to realize the allocation of resources among micro-subjects. Therefore, there is no actual microeconomic subject outside the state and government.

(4) Planned allocation of social resources. A core mechanism of planning and allocating resources is that administrative orders replace price mechanism. Under the central planned economy system, the market's allocation of resources through the price mechanism is suppressed to a minimum. All levels of economic operation are full of government plans and instructions. The rigid instruction of resource flow leads to the decline of allocation efficiency, which makes a large number of resources allocated according to the wishes of the government, and the utilization structure of resources is extremely unreasonable.

(5) Non-price characteristics of trading activities. The trading activities under the planned system were replaced by administrative instructions, and the trading objects were eliminated from the nature of goods. This has led people to seek other payment methods besides monetary payment, and the disguised payment by abusing power for personal gain and hitchhiking is also the fundamental reason for the inefficiency of planned economy.

(6) Distribution according to work. The core of this distribution model is to determine the distribution amount according to the individual contribution of workers, and to distribute it between socialist citizens and those who have the ability to work but do not work according to the principle of more work and more pay. However, due to the improvement of the socialization of production after the industrial revolution, the production behavior is more manifested as a cooperative socialized production and team production process, and the marginal product and contribution rate of individual workers cannot be accurately measured, which brings difficulties to the implementation of the distribution according to work rule. Judging from the distribution practice in the former socialist countries, most distribution according to work is actually an egalitarian distribution method. This leads to uneven bitterness and happiness, reduced enthusiasm of workers and popularization of hitchhiking.

(7) The economic structure presents obvious urban-rural differentiation and dual structure. Due to the strategic consideration of the planned economy system, we adopted the strategy of catching up with and developing, and invested heavily in the development of urban industry and heavy industry. However, due to insufficient accumulation and small economic aggregate in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, most of the former socialist countries were typical traditional agricultural countries, so they all adopted the practice of "supplementing agriculture with industry" and tried to give priority to the development of heavy industry. This development strategy, which goes against the structural balance, leads to the obvious "core-edge" structure of the economic structure under the planned economy. Government investment and resource allocation give priority to the development of cities and heavy industries, resulting in the squeezing of cities to rural areas and the suppression of industries to agriculture. The development of rural areas and agriculture is obviously suppressed by the development of cities and industries, which leads to the break of industrial chain in the later economic growth, which is the fundamental reason why the later reform originated in rural areas.

(8) Externally closed economy. The birth of the socialist regime was in the advanced stage of the world proletarian revolution, and the conflict between the two social systems obviously existed before the planned economic system came into being. Although the new regimes all expressed their desire to conduct normal trade with countries including the West, and put forward the guiding principle of "self-reliance first, supplemented by foreign aid", due to the formation of the international cold war pattern, the planned economic system of most socialist countries is essentially closed.