I don't recall the communist Soviet Union nor communist China even now taking much heed of planetary boundaries.

As Mark mentions, unusual phrasing, but more importantly what is there to recall unless you've been there and assessed it. Unlikely that you would have known from western sources.

I worked in post Soviet countries a decade after the demise of USSR. Every project still had to have an ecological assessment with detailed totting up of materials used and its impact on the environment (GOST and SNiP standards). Admittedly, most of the time engineers paid lip service to this requirement but at least they were aware of it. Prior to that I've *never* seen this done in the west.

I haven't time to tackle the current Chinese environmental policies here, but from the relatively recent reports I've seen they are vastly superior and more meaningful than any western virtue-signalling environmental policies where big shining words are used in the mission statements but nothing practical is being achieved.

Capitalism in its present neoliberal form will be the death of us.