China’s Soviet Union Obsession

A few days prior to celebrating its 69th birthday on October 1, the People’s Republic of China passed a quieter, but just as momentous, milestone. As China analyst Eric Fish pointed out on Twitter, at the end of the day on September 27, 2018, the People’s Republic of China became officially older than the Soviet Union was when it collapsed (assuming we date the latter’s founding to the 1992 Declaration of the Creation of the USSR).

This is no idle comparison. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in 1921 with major assistance and guidance from the Moscow-dominated Comintern, and accordingly modeled itself – and the eventual People’s Republic – on its Soviet comrades. The CCP today still retains its Leninist organizational structure. Accordingly, leaders in Beijing watched in horror as the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Since then, CCP officials have dedicated massive amounts of energy to figuring out why the Soviets failed, and how to avoid the same fate. Thus, the PRC officially outlasting the USSR would have been a cause for great self-satisfaction in Beijing.

Chinese President and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping has personally devoted a great deal of attention to gleaning lessons from the Soviet Union’s downfall. In December 2012, just after assuming the CCP’s top post, Xi asked the all-important questions: “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” Xi’s answer set the tone for his leadership to date: The Soviet Communist Party was not ideologically pure enough to survive. “[…T]heir ideals and beliefs had been shaken,” Xi said. “In the end, ‘the ruler’s flag over the city tower’ changed overnight. It’s a profound lesson for us!” The speech was disseminated internally throughout the CCP, in a sign of how important Xi found his own conclusions. He later repeated the same conclusions in an openly published 2016 speech on “persevering in and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

This emphasis on ideological purity is not just a matter of Soviet history; for Xi, it’s the key to the CCP’s survival today. According to his analysis in the 2016 speech, the USSR fell, in large part, because the Soviet Communist Party allowed its self-image to waver. The Party (and the country at large) repudiated its history, including past leaders Lenin and Stalin. As a result of this “historical nihilism,” the Soviet Communist Party, no longer able to claim loyalty from its members, lost control of society (and more importantly, the military). In an attempt to avoid those mistakes, Xi has spearheaded a campaign to reinvigorate ideological purity in China – which translates into increasing CCP control over discourse online, in the media, and on university campuses.

Of course, behind Xi’s interpretation, there’s the wider question of what caused the Soviet ideological decline in the first place. The implied answer is Western influence, and that explains why Xi’s CCP has been at such pains to win what it perceives as an ideological war.

In April 2013, six months after Xi assumed control of the Party, the CCP Central Committee released an internal “communique on the current state of the ideological sphere” – more commonly known as “Document 9.” The communique warns cadres to “clearly see the ideological situation as a complicated, intense struggle” before pointing out seven “false ideological trends, positions, and activities.” Most of these involve championing “Western” ideas: constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society as independent from the party-state, neoliberalism (defined here as “unrestrained economic liberalization”), and freedom of the press. The final two “false ideological trends” are directly related to Xi’s analysis of the Soviet Union’s collapse: “historical nihilism,” the catch-all phrase for deviating from the CCP-sanctioned view of history, and questioning China’s guiding ideology of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

The lesson Xi has taken from the Soviet collapse is that foreign influence, coupled with a lax Soviet attitude toward this “false ideology,” was to blame. Document 9 is full of references to “Western anti-China forces” with “ulterior motives” seeking to undermine CCP leadership. Those same conspiracy theories often appear in government explanations of any social developments the Party does not like – not only calls for democracy, but also Chinese feminism and the worker rights movement. The CCP perception is that the quest for greater rights and freedoms could not possibly be genuine, but must be the work of puppeteers from overseas.

As James Palmer writes, Xi’s view of Soviet collapse effectively closes the door on reform. “The Soviet fall, once seen at least in part as a result of the Communist Party’s own failings, has become reinterpreted as a deliberate U.S. plot and a moral failure to hold the line against Western influence,” Palmer argued for Foreign Policy. “That has ended what was once a powerful spur to reform.” In this mindset, reform is the cause of Soviet collapse, not a possible cure.

There is one major exception to this logic, however: Economic reform is seen as the reason the PRC has lasted so long. Xi himself said that without the “reform and opening” policy launched in 1978, the PRC might have shared the fate of the Soviet Union. There is a clear acknowledgement in CCP official analyses that the Soviet style of economic management is no match for the complexities of the modern-day global economy; that mismatch is believed to be a key reason for the Soviet collapse. Xi mentioned this in his speeches as well, though his focus quickly returned to ideology.

At the same time, the scope and speed of economic reform in the USSR is also seen as a factor in its downfall. Chinese analysts believe that the Soviet Union first waited too long to reform, then tried to do too much, too quickly. Again, the central mistake (in Beijing’s eyes, at least) was abdicating Soviet Communist Party levers of control over the economy – most notably, privatizing too many state-owned enterprises.

That perception is central to understanding China’s approach to “reform and opening” in the “new era” under Xi Jinping. The end goal of economic reform is to increase Party control, not dilute it. To do otherwise would be the first step down a path that ends with the CCP, not to mention China itself, falling to pieces – or so Xi and company believe. Anyone holding out hope for true market-oriented reform in China should expect to be very disappointed. 

The PRC may have outlasted the Soviet Union, but the ghost of Communist Parties past continues to haunt Beijing. When CCP leaders like Xi lay out their own personal theories as to what went wrong, the world must pay attention – because avoiding the Soviet Union’s fate is, underneath it all, the only goal for China’s Communist Party.