Thread: China studied the collapse of the Soviet Union and learned three lessons

It was at the end of the year, 30 years ago, that three men went to a country estate to go hunting, enjoy a steam bath and discuss oil and gas reserves over a few sips of brandy.

Instead, they ended up toppling an empire.

In retrospect, the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had happened slowly, the rot of corruption, oppression and secrecy eating away at the foundations of a communist dream.

But, in December 1991, when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Soviet Union's execution warrant, it shocked the world.

Not even the CIA had seen it coming.

"The USSR, as a geopolitical reality, and as a subject of international law, is ceasing to exist," they wrote in their agreement.

Mikhail Gorbachev — who was president of the Soviet Union at the time but a largely powerless figure by the end — officially stepped down and declared the USSR dead on Christmas Day, 1991.

The West spent the next three decades dancing around its corpse.

Meanwhile, another rising superpower spent 30 years performing an autopsy on the USSR, determined to avoid a similar fate.
'It's hard to overstate how obsessed they are'

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has written thousands of internal papers, held study sessions and even produced a documentary about the downfall of its former rival and ideological cousin.
Xi Jinping delivers a speech in front of red doors and a podium with a sickle and hammer.
Xi Jinping says he believes the USSR collapsed because its "ideals and convictions wavered". (AP: Xinhua/Li Xueren)

"It's hard to overstate how obsessed they are with the Soviet Union," China expert David Shambaugh told the Washington Post.

"They wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night thinking about it. It hangs over every major decision."

The Chinese Communist Party, already one of the longest ruling political parties in the world, is determined to avoid the scrap heap of history.

"Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?" Chinese leader Xi Jinping asked party officials in a leaked speech in 2012.

"An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered. In the end, nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist."

Here are the three key decisions the CCP has made in a bid to outlive the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

1. Embrace capitalism … with 'Chinese characteristics'

China's greatest success was the Soviet Union's biggest catastrophe: The economy.

In the early days, the USSR was an economic rival to the United States, with a huge manufacturing capacity but, in the end, corruption destroyed efficiency.

By the final years, the USSR's economy was practically groaning with the costs of space and arms races with the US, and proxy wars in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan.
Two men stand outside a shack with pollution stacks in the background
Between 4 million and 5 million Soviet families lived below the poverty line in the late 1980s. (Reuters)

The Soviet Union's planned economy was centrally controlled, beset by inefficiency, waste and shortages of goods.

"The ruble had only paper value, with Soviet citizens holding overall 400-450 billion rubles, but they had nothing to spend it on. Store shelves carried few consumer goods," said Diana Villiers Negroponte from the Brookings Institute.

Conscious of the USSR's blunders, Beijing rejected the socialist command economy, and embraced what it calls "capitalism with Chinese characteristics".

From the 1970s, the door was opened to foreign investment and poverty rates dropped as people flocked to cities for new, industrial jobs.

China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and blossomed into the "world's factory" virtually overnight.

With state support, Chinese companies became manufacturing giants.
Sparks coming off a manufacturing machine while a factory worker in a mask looks on
China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. (China Daily via Reuters)

Despite slowing growth in recent years as it matured, China is projected by some economists to overtake the US as the world's largest economy by 2028.

China's leadership is determined to give its people a material standard of living similar to that found in any successful liberal economy.

But that does not mean it embraces Western values.

Many within Beijing's leadership consider a USSR policy called glasnost, that was promised by Gorbachev in the dying years of the union, to be a fatal error.

2. Manage the message

Glasnost — which roughly translates in English to openness — was Gorbachev's last-ditch gambit to save the USSR in the mid-80s.

After decades of censorship and secrecy, Gorbachev said the time had come for increased government transparency and freedom of expression.

Banned books were allowed to return to libraries, many citizens learned about former leader Joseph Stalin's atrocities for the first time, and Russians were suddenly exposed to the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those in Western democracies.
A woman, looking upset while she holds her hand to her mouth, looks at newspaper clippings on a wall
The names of those who died in Stalin's gulags were publicly released in Moscow in 1988. (Wikimedia Commons: Dmirty Borko )

"[Glasnost] had the effect of stirring up waves of criticism that undermined authority and trust, and things quickly became shambolic," Diana Villiers Negroponte said.

The new policy of openness was adopted in the same year as a devastating nuclear accident in Chernobyl, and citizens used their newfound freedom of expression to express their outrage over the catastrophe.

"The Chernobyl disaster, more than anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression in the Soviet Union, to the point that the system, as we knew it, became untenable," Gorbachev later said.

With that in mind, Beijing's leadership has been far more careful to manage the flow of information within China.

A combination of state laws and technology creates what is known as the Great Firewall of China, blocking or restricting access to Western sites, including Facebook, Google, Twitter and Wikipedia.

A six-part documentary that was mandatory viewing for Communist Party officials in 2013 placed the blame for the collapse of the USSR squarely on Gorbachev for inviting in Western influence.
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in cowboy hats leaning against a fence
Some official Chinese documents hold Mikhail Gorbachev, right, responsible for the USSR's downfall, partly because he pursued better ties with the US and its then-president Ronald Reagan, left. (US State Department: Bob Galbraith)

The film, Silent Contest, warned that China could face a similar fate if it succumbed to "peaceful evolution".

That's based on a belief that the United States is slowly but surely trying to topple Beijing's leadership, not with bombs, but with democratic values.

Experts say that, among the more conservative members of the CCP, there is a fear that if they allow Western culture to take hold, a so-called "colour revolution" could follow.

Colour revolutions are peaceful uprisings against governments that first emerged in the former USSR.

"Anti-China forces have never given up their attempt to instigate a colour revolution in this country," officials wrote in China's 2015 defence white paper.

3. Watch the periphery

At its peak, the Soviet Union was the world's largest country, making up nearly one-seventh of the Earth's land surface.

However, within the behemoth nation were 15 dramatically different republics, dozens of ethnicities, languages and cultures.
A photo from 1989 showing a huge crowd of people standing on the Berlin Wall, helping people below get up
East Germany, a satellite state of the USSR, unifed with West Germany in 1989. (Wikimedia Commons: Sue Ream)

Soviet satellite states began to drift from the USSR's orbit in the 1980s.

By Christmas Day, 1991, all that was left was a significantly smaller Russia with three-quarters of the USSR's territory and half its population.

In contrast, Beijing has tried to keep regions on the periphery — Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet — under increasingly tight control.

Huge pro-independence protests in Hong Kong in 2019 were derided by a top Beijing official as having "‘obvious characteristics of a colour revolution".
Journalists and photographers stand around in protective gear as a fire rages in terraces during a protest
Protests against an extradition law in 2019 grew into a huge movement demanding Hong Kong get more autonomy from Beijing. (ABC News: Brant Cumming)

The protests did not end in widespread bloodshed but, instead, with the passage of a 2020 law that makes it easier to punish protesters and reduces the city's autonomy.
Can China's leaders avoid the USSR's fate?

Now 72, the People's Republic of China has outlived the USSR by three years.

The contrast between the Soviet Union in its dying days and modern China could not be more stark.

But the answer to the question of whether the CCP and its leader, Xi Jinping, can hold on to power in the long term depends on who you ask.

China as we know it has "peaked" according to Dan Blumenthal, the director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute

"While China is acting to further [its] ever-grander ambitions, it is also facing profound internal problems and increasing rot in the party," he wrote in his book, The China Nightmare.

Those internal problems, according to Mr Blumenthal, include a looming labour shortage, an ageing population and "inefficient, state-owned enterprise".

But others have a far more optimistic view.

"China, in my opinion, is on the rise," former Russian parliamentarian Mikhail Chelnokov told Chinese tabloid the Global Times this week.

"China is gaining more and more power, politically, economically and militarily."

https://www.abc. net.au/news/2021-12-26/ussr-collapsed-30-years-ago-china-tries-to-avoid-same-fate/100705112

Written by Hu Xijin himself, the 'Mouth of the Yangtze'-


Disintegration of the Soviet Union a vaccine for China
By Hu Xijin






Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. There is no need for the Chinese people to sigh for it. What we should do is drawing lessons from it, because the US very much hopes that China will become the second Soviet Union and fall apart one day.

The first lesson: The entire Soviet Union, from the leadership to the intellectuals, had been fooled. They were surprisingly naïve. How stupid. The Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, sent the first astronaut into space, and built the world's first nuclear power plant. Its strength of science and technology once made the US tremble. Its light industry and agriculture sectors lagged a little behind. But we know today that those problems are easy to solve.

However, the Soviet Union society felt the country was dying, they disbanded and gave up on their own, and were full of illusions that the US would be kind to the Soviet successor after the disintegration. If the Soviet Union were still there, how could Russia be bullied by the US like today! Future Russian historians will define the disintegration of the Soviet Union as one of the country's greatest tragedies of voluntarily giving up its strength.

The second lesson: The Soviet Union had a poor economic performance, especially in the later stage. Daily necessities were in short supply and issues related to people's livelihoods worsened. As a result, it lost people's hearts and everything. The Soviet Union had a strong military which did not second to the US in their arms race. But the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) overlooked one point - the real competition lies in the economy and people's living standards.

In 1986, I was a postgraduate student. There were many teachers and foreign students from the Soviet Union in my university. I once sent a teacher back to his country and found his luggage contained about 20 boxes, all of which were filled with Chinese products. In 1990, I accompanied a Soviet press delegation and found they gathered cans of Coke and beer in the refrigerator in their rooms, packed and brought them back to their country. That was 10 years since China's reform and opening-up, and China's material life was even richer than that in the last years of the Soviet Union. How can people's mind-sets in Soviet Union not be confused during those years, and how could its people not envy the West? Without cohesion, how could its people avoid losing morale?

The third lesson: The Soviet Union society was rigid. When it touched upon reforms, it began with the political system, Western thoughts and values invaded in an all-round way, and the reform process was seriously out of control. Former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev wrote a famous book, New Thinking for Our Country and the World. He was idealistic and bookish, believing political reforms can naturally promote constructive changes in the country. The West praised him so much that made him lost. And the Soviet Union fell into chaos in a fundamental way, and could no longer be integrated.

Fourth, the most fundamental lesson: The leadership of the CPSU had been severely weakened and was heading toward splitting apart. Gorbachev emphasized the strengthening of the power of the Soviet and transferred away most of the power of the party. In some of the republic members, the first secretary of the party led officials and the grassroots to fight against the central government, seeking independence, yet the central government was unable to take action against them. It can be said that the party split first, and then the Soviet Union disintegrated.

The Soviet Union started its reform later than China did. They could not learn from the experience of China's economic reform or the way China dealt with liberalization and political turbulence, or they were unwilling to learn. China was ahead of the Soviet Union, becoming the one to eat the first crab in the socialist camp about reform and opening up. They all watched our setbacks and successes, but they couldn't understand it like a fool, and they didn't know how to draw inferences about other cases from one instance. As a result, China, as an explorer, succeeded, the Soviet Union failed.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union is tantamount to a vaccine for the Chinese society, which has been effective for 30 years.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202112/1243340.shtml

Adapt or perish , it is a condition that does not only threaten communist empires.

The Chinese seem to be paying attention.

The View, from China

nope that would be the global times view. About as accurate as Fox News