Pages

7 September 2022

Gorbachev Did Save One Communist Party — China’s

Minxin Pei

The death of the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev naturally elicited an outpouring of praise from Western leaders for his role in ending the Cold War. If Gorbachev helped bring freedom to most of the former Soviet bloc, the revolution he led arguably led to the opposite outcome in China. Without Gorbachev’s example, the Chinese regime might not be as resilient, repressive and resistant to political reform as it is today.

China’s official reaction to the news of Gorbachev’s passing has been muted. That’s little surprise; one wouldn’t expect the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to have anything positive to say about a leader who tried to democratize a communist regime peacefully. At the same time, Chinese leaders can hardly deny Gorbachev’s influence: Many of the strategies they’ve followed since 1991 have been consciously adopted in response to his policies.

In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, for instance, China accelerated pro-market reforms and widely opened its economy to the outside world. At the time, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping delivered a stark warning to his comrades: The Soviet Union had collapsed because its communist leaders had failed miserably to deliver a better standard of living. The CCP would be doomed if it repeated the same mistake.

Over the previous decade, Deng had fought bitter battles with hardliners who objected to economic integration with the capitalist West. Such opposition melted away after 1991. Although Deng himself always had a clear understanding of the need for economic modernization, he still required a powerful shock such as the Soviet collapse to persuade others of the wisdom of his strategy.

In the early 1990s, the party at last rallied behind Deng’s mantra, “Development is the cardinal truth.” The reforms implemented then led to years of sustained double-digit growth.

Where Deng thought Gorbachev had gone wrong, of course, was in relaxing control over society through his glasnost (openness) policy. Following so soon after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union only gave Chinese leaders an even more powerful impetus to suppress any and all potential threats.

Consequently, the party began to allocate massive resources to domestic security. Spending on law enforcement rose five-and-a-half times in real terms from 1991 to 2002. Generous investments in the coercive apparatus enabled the party to modernize the surveillance state and snuff out potential opposition forces, including political dissidents, religious groups, organized labor and cults.

Here we may find the answer to the puzzle of how rapid economic development consolidated China’s one-party state instead of destroying it, as in South Korea and Taiwan. Contrary to expectations that rising wealth would inevitably lead to democratization, the Chinese “economic miracle” has given the CCP a new lease of life by helping it gain popular support and build a more capable system of repression.

However, even the combination of strong performance legitimacy and high-tech coercion has not entirely freed the CCP from its fear of Gorbachev-style glasnost. The CCP seems especially haunted by the evaporation of the political legitimacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union soon after Gorbachev permitted the media and the intelligentsia to expose the party’s crimes against its own people.

So, in recent years, the CCP has launched a new campaign against “historical nihilism,” a term applied to any form of truth-telling that challenges the party’s official narrative about its past, in particular the catastrophic rule of Mao Zedong (1949-1976). To ensure that none dares to air the party’s dirty laundry or expose its falsehoods, the Chinese government has tightened censorship in the media and on college campuses, and levied severe penalties, including imprisonment, on those found guilty of “historical nihilism.”

Recent developments do not augur well for the CCP. Its survival strategy inspired by the Soviet collapse has run its course. As China’s economic growth has slowed to a crawl because of deteriorating demographics and market-unfriendly policies, the central pillar of the party’s legitimacy looks increasingly shaky.

Chinese leaders also have forgotten one of the most important lessons their predecessors drew from the Soviet collapse: The Cold War bankrupted the Soviet empire and ultimately led to its breakup. Instead of maintaining a low international profile as dictated by Deng, China’s leaders have adopted an assertive foreign policy that’s contributed to a breakdown of China’s relations with the West.

If stagnant growth and escalating geopolitical tensions continue for a decade or two, the CCP may find itself in the same dire straits that greeted Gorbachev when he assumed power in 1985. The only unknown is whether future Chinese leaders can do better than Gorbachev in salvaging a crisis-ridden regime.

If anything, the CCP likely will fare worse. By precluding a peaceful transition to democracy, the party may inadvertently create conditions for the kind of cataclysmic upheaval Gorbachev tried so hard to avert. While struggling to avoid the Soviet leader’s mistakes, China may commit even worse ones.

No comments:

Post a Comment