The Chinese failure of agriculture was under embargo from the West's proven science and supply chains. They were forced to come up with their own solutions from scratch from a starting position that was far far behind the rest of the world.
Lysenko was operating in a world where the West had developed the theory of the gene but not yet proven the gene existed and the West immediately developed it into eugenics from its racist tyrannical fascist politics, and Lysenko and the politicians were reacting to that. While Europeans were going around saying "genetics is real therefore we should kill all the poors and the browns before they taint our bloodline", the Soviets were saying "if we improve social conditions then people will heal for generations to come".
I know we are literally awash in comic book level propaganda where the evil Soviets were dastardly lying to everyone for power and control, but if you actually read the history, the narratives we have been fed start to look a lot like outright lies.
100% if they had followed the science they would have done better, but science is not apolitical, research on heredity especially so, and without any molecular basis for the theory of genetics, it looks a lot like master race politics.