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China studied the collapse of the Soviet Union and learned three lessons to avoid a similar fate
By Rebecca Armitage
Dec. 25 2021
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 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.
"It's hard to overstate how obsessed they are with the Soviet Union," China expert David Shambaugh told the Washington Post.
"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.
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.
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.
"[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.
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.
First Poland broke away in 1989, followed by Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Soviet satellite states began to drift from the USSR's orbit.
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".
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."
www.abc.net.au
By Rebecca Armitage
Dec. 25 2021
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.
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.
"It's hard to overstate how obsessed they are with the Soviet Union," China expert David Shambaugh told the Washington Post.
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.
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.
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.
"[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.
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.
First Poland broke away in 1989, followed by Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Soviet satellite states began to drift from the USSR's orbit.
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".
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."
'It's hard to overstate how obsessed they are': Why China is so fixated on one country's demise
For 30 years, China has studied the fall of the USSR to avoid a similar collapse. They made three key decisions in Beijing to outlive their ideological cousin.
www.abc.net.au
