While current and former heads of state of the West mourned the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, highlighting the role of the last leader of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and the rapprochement with the West that he promoted, China had two reactions: coldness and aggressiveness.
In the first case, fits the official manifestation of the Chinese regime, which, through a spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs limited itself to saying that Gorbachev “has made positive contributions to the normalization of relations between China and the Soviet Union”.
In the second category, the former Soviet leader was attacked on social media and in the Beijing-related press. “Gorbachev brought disgrace not only to the people of the Soviet Union, but to the entire world,” political commentator Xiang Ligang wrote on Chinese social network Weibo, claiming that the war in Ukraine is a result of the end of the Soviet Union: “This disaster continues. until today.”
Journalist Hu Xijin, known for his radical pro-Communist Party of China stance, wrote on Twitter that Gorbachev “was one of the most controversial leaders in the world”.
“He was widely acclaimed in the West for selling his country’s interests. The West has achieved peace, but wars continue to break out in areas of the former Soviet Union: Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine…”, he criticized.
The state-run newspaper Global Times, where Hu Xijin is a columnist, has attributed the collapse of the Soviet Union to the “partial democratization of Soviet society under Gorbachev.”
“As a lesson for China’s own governance, the Communist Party of China maintains its own socialist path with Chinese characteristics, emphasizing political maturity and sobriety”, pointed out an article published by the newspaper.
The text of the Global Times is the key to understanding the Chinese communists’ true feeling for Gorbachev: their perception is that the reforms promoted by the Soviet leader during his government (1985-1991), the rapprochement with the West and its opposition to the idea of violently suppressing separatist or pro-democracy movements in the former European communist bloc (Latvia and Lithuania were exceptions) were a decisive weakness for the collapse of the Soviet Union – a mistake not to be repeated by China.
In a speech addressed to Communist Party members in December of
and whose content was leaked the following month, dictator Xi Jinping, who at the time was already secretary general of the party and would assume the presidency of the country months later, justified a wave of persecution of senior officials that was underway at the time. .
“Why should we maintain the Party’s leadership over the military?” Xi said. “Because that is the lesson left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, where the military was depoliticized, separated from the Party and nationalized, the Party was disarmed.”
Recalling an attempted coup d’état against the then Soviet leader in 1991, which failed but ended up deepening the path to the end of the Soviet Union, Xi said that “some people tried to save the Soviet Union; they arrested Gorbachev, but in a few days this was reversed, because they did not have the instruments to exercise power.”
“ Yeltsin [que depois se tornaria presidente russo] made a speech on top of a tank, but the military did not respond, maintaining the so-called ‘neutrality’. Finally, Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party in an irresponsible statement. A great party ended up so easily. Proportionally, the Soviet Communist Party had more members than we did, but no one was man enough to stand up and resist,” Xi added.
The future Chinese dictator’s speech foreshadowed a increased repression in all sectors of Chinese society in the following years (such as actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang), with a total opposition to any kind of opening or reforms.
Logo at the beginning of Xi’s first term, the Communist Party of China participated in the production of documentaries about the end of the Soviet Union, in which they defended the thesis that Gorbachev’s reforms and his inability to maintain the status quo caused this collapse. This material was widely used in the “instruction” of CCP members and re-released this year.
“Xi certainly wants to make the Chinese party-state impervious to the kind of collapse that has befallen him. the Soviet Union, and many of its policies in recent years are aimed at just that,” Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told CNN. “Perhaps no other country has studied the lessons of the Soviet collapse as carefully as China.”
Zilvinas Silenas, president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), pointed out in an article in this week that, after Gorbachev, many tyrants and would-be dictators understood that the way to stay in power was to not allow any openings – including economic ones.
“They carefully studied the attempts to Gorbachev and concluded, perhaps correctly, that inherently flawed systems cannot be fixed. It is impossible to establish central planning without abolishing its central premise that the government, not consumers, knows best what to produce and in what quantities. To maintain power, governments need to control the entire economy, or at least most of it,” he pointed out.
Many analysts see that Gorbachev was not exactly a Democrat and could have repressed the internal movements of the Soviet bloc with violence. But he didn’t – at least, not on the scale of his predecessors. Judging by Xi Jinping’s view of events that took place in Eastern Europe 31 years ago, this moral conflict never came close to passing through the Chinese dictator’s mind.
