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In the heyday of Sino-Soviet socialist brotherhood in the 1950s, Chinese liked to say that “today’s Soviet Union is tomorrow’s China”, as Beijing faithfully followed Moscow’s every footstep in development.
But since the collapse of communist rule and the Soviet Union in early 1990s, the old saying has become an evil omen haunting China’s communist leaders.
A photo of the late Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Photo: SCMPAnd there are renewed shudders among the Beijing leadership following a warning from President Xi Jinping calling for the need to pay greater attention to the dramatic events in Moscow more than two decades ago.
Significantly, officials ranging from top central government ministers to heads of grassroots party organs have been called on to watch a four-part DVD documentary about the historic events.
The video, In Memory of the Collapse of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, is jointly produced by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and its affiliated Research Centre of World Socialism. It tells the story on how a once great power stumbled to become a second- or third-class nation.
The video blames Mikhail Gorbachev’s radical moves to introduce Western-style democratic reform and to relax the party’s monopoly control of ideology and also Boris Yeltsin’s rush to privatise state-owned enterprises as the main reasons behind the collapse of Communist rule and the dismantling of the Soviet empire.
Another new video co-produced by the National Defence University that was leaked late last month tells how the West, the United States in particular, has schemed for a Soviet-style collapse in China.
Entitled The Silent Contest, the 100-minute video begins with a lament for the end of the Soviet Union, and proceeds through recent history to show the supposedly evil motives behind America’s relations with China and other communist countries.
General Liu Yazhou, political commissar of the military institution and son-in-law of former president Li Xiannian, produced the work.
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered
Xi Jinping
Analysts pointed out that the renewed fear of a Soviet-style nightmare in China might reflect the leadership’s anxiety over slowing economic growth, rising social tensions and growing calls for political reform following the leadership transition last November.
They said that whether the new generation of Chinese leaders will pursue reform in the next few years lies in how they interpret the Soviet collapse.
Xi, the party’s general secretary, appears more fascinated by the ideological aspects of the Soviet downfall than his predecessors.
In an internal speech early this year, Xi told party officials that China must still heed the “deeply profound” lessons of the former Soviet Union, where political rot, ideological heresy and military disloyalty brought down the governing party.
“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” Xi asked, according to a summary of his comments that has circulated among officials, but has not been published by the state-run news media.
“An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” he said.
The mainland’s propaganda machines have responded to Xi’s call, publishing more articles warning about the possibility of a Soviet-style collapse in the last major communist-ruled state.
Guards march on Tiananmen Square on a smoggy day in late September, 2013. Photo: Xinhua Steve Tsang, director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, said Xi was clearly setting out his “policy line”, which is to strengthen the party’s capacity and determination to adhere closely tight to the existing system, and resist any demand for democratisation or constitutional rule as understood in the West.
“The sense of crisis has been reintroduced to warn the rest of the party not to be complacent and to embrace changes that he is introducing,” he said.
Kerry Brown, executive director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, said that although Chinese think tanks had expended huge effort and time on trying to understand why communism in the Soviet Union failed, there remains a lack of consensus over the cause.
Was the most critical issue a lack of economic reform, over-hasty political reform, issues intrinsic to the structure and culture of power within the USSR, or the failure to reach consensus within the leadership?
“The one point upon which most Chinese intellectuals, politicians and officials seem to agree is that, contrary to mainstream opinion in the West, the collapse was not a good thing and the results were to cost Russia and the states created out of the ruins of the USSR dearly,” Brown said.
He said that one of the great paradoxes of our time was that the world’s second-biggest, and most dynamic, economy happens in name at least to be governed by a system that was written off two decades ago.
“This is no cause for celebration in China however,” Brown said.
Xiaoyu Pu, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, said that while the Communist Party had maintained its legitimacy through economic performance and nationalist mobilisation, it faces many challenges.
Thus, the primary security concern of the party leaders is not national security, but regime security.
“For the CCP, the collapse of the Soviet Union has always been regarded as a ‘negative example’,” Pu said. “The party has put a lot of energy and resources into examining what lessons the CCP could learn from the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
However, Pu said the implications of the documentary programmes should not be over-estimated as they “might reflect the voice of the leftist and conservative faction within the party”
“It is hard to say the programmes reflect the consensus of the CCP leadership,” he said.
Tsang noted that the USSR lasted 69 years and the People’s Republic of China had now been in existence for 64 years. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party could surpass the Soviet Communist Party during Xi’s tenure.
Xi has every intention to ensure the People’s Republic will outlast the USSR and thus has every reason to get the Communist Party to re-learn the lessons of why their comrades failed.
Paranoia from Soviet Union collapse haunts China's Communist Party, 22 years on | South China Morning Post
Read this, hahaha:
For Xinhua, if China collapses like the USSR or worse, arrest the bloggers!
Rome (AsiaNews) - Since yesterday, Communist Party leaders and their many aides and experts are in Beidaihe (Hebei), a resort town on the Bohai Sea, to discuss ways to deal with the country's main problems, such as its stuttering economy, rampant corruption, and the coming trial of Bo Xilai. Behind a strong security ring, as in Mao's time, Chinese leaders will also have to address the issue of political reform in the country or at least within the Party.
Reforms, such as greater democracy inside and outside the party, as well as laws that apply to Party member, have often been mentioned by those in power, whether Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and even current president and party secretary, Xi Jinping. So far, nothing has come of it.
In fact, state media have been recently involved in a campaign against the dangers that democracy and the rule of law ("constitutionalism") pose for the country.
Yesterday, the People's Daily published an editorial warning against "constitutionalism", and the idea that laws should guarantee and protect the rights of citizens.
According to the Communist Party's official newspaper, this idea is actually part of a Western plot to destroy socialism and impose capitalist ideals on China.
Financed by US intelligence agencies, this campaign is said to have been underway since the war and is blamed for the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union.
Xinhua published a similar article, but with a much a greater punch, on 1 August, titled "If unrest comes to China, it will be worse than in the USSR" penned by a certain Wang Xiaoshi.
The 5,000-character piece warns China that following in the footsteps of the USSR, i.e. making democratic reforms, would lead to misery and poverty. The author blames activists and bloggers for spreading discontent among the population with "false news".
China has always looked at the end of the Soviet empire with dread. The Party blamed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 on Poland's Solidarity (Solidarność) trade union and Pope John Paul II. This is why Beijing has been especially harsh on would-be free trade unions, regional autonomy, religion in general and Catholicism religion in particular.
Wang Xiaoshi's analysis is one of a kind. For him, the Soviet Union was some kind of heaven on earth. But now, "people truly awakened to 'democratization' and 'universal values of happiness'" discovered that "GDP had fallen by half; access to the sea achieved through the centuries was gone, along with a fleet that aged, corroded and finally fell into a pile of scrap metal; where new domestic oligarchs plundered state assets; Russians lined up on the street in supply shortages; and veterans had to sell their medals in exchange for bread."
For Wang, China could end up the same way, if not worse, because many bloggers espouse the same ideals that led to the collapse of the USSR.
"Every day," he wrote, "microbloggers and their mentors in the same cause pass rumours, fabricate negative news about [China's] society, create an apocalyptic vision of China's imminent collapse, and denigrate the existing socialist system-all to promote the European and American model of capitalism and constitutionalism."
In a burst of fury, Wang said, "Coldly look at you Western world's slaves! You cheat people on the internet every day, you deceive Chinese people and allow others to bully China, making China poor and its military weak! You are dogs of the US. You bring shame and disaster to China".
Ending in a patriotic note, the article goes on to say, "Anglers, mentors and well known people who have malicious motives, if you want to provoke turmoil in China by controlling public opinion, you'll have to step over my body. I won't let you succeed as long as I live!"
Trashed online because of its typical Communist style, Wang's article tends to project onto the victims the traits of their executioners. Hence, bloggers and activists are accused of spreading "false news", but it is in China that media can erase facts, like medical and natural disasters (SARS, earthquakes fatalities, investigations into corruption, etc).
Post-Soviet poverty is not that different from exists China where "oligarchs" can get away with not paying loans back, stealing workers' wages, grabbing land from farmers, thus widening the gap between rich party members and the poor.
Indeed, the article was not spared serious criticism. "Let's talk about who will lead China into unrest first," said Yu Jianrong, a well-known academic and the director of the Social Issues Research Centre at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Isn't it the bigwigs that made the gap between rich and poor larger? Isn't it the uncontrolled political power that creates injustice in society? Isn't it corrupt officials that ruin morality? You don't look at these, but only criticize people's speech. What's your motivation?"
Wang's these, it is worth noting, is not that much different from what President Xi Jinping said last December during his visit to Guangdong.
Xi, who has a reputation as a moderate and a reformer, warned the party that the People's Republic might go the way of the Soviet Union.
"Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken," Xi said. "To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party's organizations on all levels."
On that occasion, Xi Jinping did not say anything on the country's much vaunted "political reforms". On the contrary, "Only socialism can save China," he said. "Only (economic) reform and opening-up can develop China, develop socialism, and develop Marxism."
In practice, this means more Deng Xiaoping, who led China's technical and economic modernisation without its "fifth modernisation", namely democracy, a transformation that brought China to its current state of widespread corruption and entrenched oligarchy.
Almost as a way to allay Wang Xiaoshi's concerns, Chinese authorities have intensified their violent crackdown against activists and bloggers for reporting "false news" about the China's state of affairs, just like in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev came to power.
But since the collapse of communist rule and the Soviet Union in early 1990s, the old saying has become an evil omen haunting China’s communist leaders.
A photo of the late Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Photo: SCMPAnd there are renewed shudders among the Beijing leadership following a warning from President Xi Jinping calling for the need to pay greater attention to the dramatic events in Moscow more than two decades ago.Significantly, officials ranging from top central government ministers to heads of grassroots party organs have been called on to watch a four-part DVD documentary about the historic events.
The video, In Memory of the Collapse of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, is jointly produced by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and its affiliated Research Centre of World Socialism. It tells the story on how a once great power stumbled to become a second- or third-class nation.
The video blames Mikhail Gorbachev’s radical moves to introduce Western-style democratic reform and to relax the party’s monopoly control of ideology and also Boris Yeltsin’s rush to privatise state-owned enterprises as the main reasons behind the collapse of Communist rule and the dismantling of the Soviet empire.
Another new video co-produced by the National Defence University that was leaked late last month tells how the West, the United States in particular, has schemed for a Soviet-style collapse in China.
Entitled The Silent Contest, the 100-minute video begins with a lament for the end of the Soviet Union, and proceeds through recent history to show the supposedly evil motives behind America’s relations with China and other communist countries.
General Liu Yazhou, political commissar of the military institution and son-in-law of former president Li Xiannian, produced the work.
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered
Xi Jinping
Analysts pointed out that the renewed fear of a Soviet-style nightmare in China might reflect the leadership’s anxiety over slowing economic growth, rising social tensions and growing calls for political reform following the leadership transition last November.
They said that whether the new generation of Chinese leaders will pursue reform in the next few years lies in how they interpret the Soviet collapse.
Xi, the party’s general secretary, appears more fascinated by the ideological aspects of the Soviet downfall than his predecessors.
In an internal speech early this year, Xi told party officials that China must still heed the “deeply profound” lessons of the former Soviet Union, where political rot, ideological heresy and military disloyalty brought down the governing party.
“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” Xi asked, according to a summary of his comments that has circulated among officials, but has not been published by the state-run news media.
“An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” he said.
The mainland’s propaganda machines have responded to Xi’s call, publishing more articles warning about the possibility of a Soviet-style collapse in the last major communist-ruled state.
“The sense of crisis has been reintroduced to warn the rest of the party not to be complacent and to embrace changes that he is introducing,” he said.
Kerry Brown, executive director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, said that although Chinese think tanks had expended huge effort and time on trying to understand why communism in the Soviet Union failed, there remains a lack of consensus over the cause.
Was the most critical issue a lack of economic reform, over-hasty political reform, issues intrinsic to the structure and culture of power within the USSR, or the failure to reach consensus within the leadership?
“The one point upon which most Chinese intellectuals, politicians and officials seem to agree is that, contrary to mainstream opinion in the West, the collapse was not a good thing and the results were to cost Russia and the states created out of the ruins of the USSR dearly,” Brown said.
He said that one of the great paradoxes of our time was that the world’s second-biggest, and most dynamic, economy happens in name at least to be governed by a system that was written off two decades ago.
“This is no cause for celebration in China however,” Brown said.
Xiaoyu Pu, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, said that while the Communist Party had maintained its legitimacy through economic performance and nationalist mobilisation, it faces many challenges.
Thus, the primary security concern of the party leaders is not national security, but regime security.
“For the CCP, the collapse of the Soviet Union has always been regarded as a ‘negative example’,” Pu said. “The party has put a lot of energy and resources into examining what lessons the CCP could learn from the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
However, Pu said the implications of the documentary programmes should not be over-estimated as they “might reflect the voice of the leftist and conservative faction within the party”
“It is hard to say the programmes reflect the consensus of the CCP leadership,” he said.
Tsang noted that the USSR lasted 69 years and the People’s Republic of China had now been in existence for 64 years. In other words, the Chinese Communist Party could surpass the Soviet Communist Party during Xi’s tenure.
Xi has every intention to ensure the People’s Republic will outlast the USSR and thus has every reason to get the Communist Party to re-learn the lessons of why their comrades failed.
Paranoia from Soviet Union collapse haunts China's Communist Party, 22 years on | South China Morning Post
Read this, hahaha:
For Xinhua, if China collapses like the USSR or worse, arrest the bloggers!
Rome (AsiaNews) - Since yesterday, Communist Party leaders and their many aides and experts are in Beidaihe (Hebei), a resort town on the Bohai Sea, to discuss ways to deal with the country's main problems, such as its stuttering economy, rampant corruption, and the coming trial of Bo Xilai. Behind a strong security ring, as in Mao's time, Chinese leaders will also have to address the issue of political reform in the country or at least within the Party.
Reforms, such as greater democracy inside and outside the party, as well as laws that apply to Party member, have often been mentioned by those in power, whether Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and even current president and party secretary, Xi Jinping. So far, nothing has come of it.
In fact, state media have been recently involved in a campaign against the dangers that democracy and the rule of law ("constitutionalism") pose for the country.
Yesterday, the People's Daily published an editorial warning against "constitutionalism", and the idea that laws should guarantee and protect the rights of citizens.
According to the Communist Party's official newspaper, this idea is actually part of a Western plot to destroy socialism and impose capitalist ideals on China.
Financed by US intelligence agencies, this campaign is said to have been underway since the war and is blamed for the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union.
Xinhua published a similar article, but with a much a greater punch, on 1 August, titled "If unrest comes to China, it will be worse than in the USSR" penned by a certain Wang Xiaoshi.
The 5,000-character piece warns China that following in the footsteps of the USSR, i.e. making democratic reforms, would lead to misery and poverty. The author blames activists and bloggers for spreading discontent among the population with "false news".
China has always looked at the end of the Soviet empire with dread. The Party blamed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 on Poland's Solidarity (Solidarność) trade union and Pope John Paul II. This is why Beijing has been especially harsh on would-be free trade unions, regional autonomy, religion in general and Catholicism religion in particular.
Wang Xiaoshi's analysis is one of a kind. For him, the Soviet Union was some kind of heaven on earth. But now, "people truly awakened to 'democratization' and 'universal values of happiness'" discovered that "GDP had fallen by half; access to the sea achieved through the centuries was gone, along with a fleet that aged, corroded and finally fell into a pile of scrap metal; where new domestic oligarchs plundered state assets; Russians lined up on the street in supply shortages; and veterans had to sell their medals in exchange for bread."
For Wang, China could end up the same way, if not worse, because many bloggers espouse the same ideals that led to the collapse of the USSR.
"Every day," he wrote, "microbloggers and their mentors in the same cause pass rumours, fabricate negative news about [China's] society, create an apocalyptic vision of China's imminent collapse, and denigrate the existing socialist system-all to promote the European and American model of capitalism and constitutionalism."
In a burst of fury, Wang said, "Coldly look at you Western world's slaves! You cheat people on the internet every day, you deceive Chinese people and allow others to bully China, making China poor and its military weak! You are dogs of the US. You bring shame and disaster to China".
Ending in a patriotic note, the article goes on to say, "Anglers, mentors and well known people who have malicious motives, if you want to provoke turmoil in China by controlling public opinion, you'll have to step over my body. I won't let you succeed as long as I live!"
Trashed online because of its typical Communist style, Wang's article tends to project onto the victims the traits of their executioners. Hence, bloggers and activists are accused of spreading "false news", but it is in China that media can erase facts, like medical and natural disasters (SARS, earthquakes fatalities, investigations into corruption, etc).
Post-Soviet poverty is not that different from exists China where "oligarchs" can get away with not paying loans back, stealing workers' wages, grabbing land from farmers, thus widening the gap between rich party members and the poor.
Indeed, the article was not spared serious criticism. "Let's talk about who will lead China into unrest first," said Yu Jianrong, a well-known academic and the director of the Social Issues Research Centre at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Isn't it the bigwigs that made the gap between rich and poor larger? Isn't it the uncontrolled political power that creates injustice in society? Isn't it corrupt officials that ruin morality? You don't look at these, but only criticize people's speech. What's your motivation?"
Wang's these, it is worth noting, is not that much different from what President Xi Jinping said last December during his visit to Guangdong.
Xi, who has a reputation as a moderate and a reformer, warned the party that the People's Republic might go the way of the Soviet Union.
"Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken," Xi said. "To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party's organizations on all levels."
On that occasion, Xi Jinping did not say anything on the country's much vaunted "political reforms". On the contrary, "Only socialism can save China," he said. "Only (economic) reform and opening-up can develop China, develop socialism, and develop Marxism."
In practice, this means more Deng Xiaoping, who led China's technical and economic modernisation without its "fifth modernisation", namely democracy, a transformation that brought China to its current state of widespread corruption and entrenched oligarchy.
Almost as a way to allay Wang Xiaoshi's concerns, Chinese authorities have intensified their violent crackdown against activists and bloggers for reporting "false news" about the China's state of affairs, just like in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev came to power.
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