How collapse of the Soviet Union still weighs on Chinese leaders’ minds 30 years on
- The political turmoil that ended the world’s first communist state spurred Beijing to maintain tight political control while it allowed economic liberalisation
- Xi Jinping has said great powers fall when the central authority loses power and respect, and has sought to tighten ideological control since coming to power
The Soviet Union’s collapse at the end of 1991, has weighed heavily on the minds of China’s leaders over the past three decades as they seek to avoid a similar fate.
Observers argue its transition from a planned to a market economy that began in the 1970s avoided the pains suffered by Russia and other Soviet states due to rapid privatisation and price liberalism, while the leadership has maintained tight political control.
Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian Federation’s first minister of foreign affairs, said that leading figures such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin failed to seize the moment, and had not been able to control the chain of events – which began to spiral out of control with the aborted coup attempt in 1991 that triggered the collapse of the USSR – and control economic problems such as rampant inflation.
“The results of those events very much depended on political guidance, on political figures and leaders,” Kozyrev told an online panel organised by the US think tank Kennan Institute on December 9.
“Unfortunately both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, they failed to live up to the opportunity for a variety of reasons … The leaders, they should have taken over but they failed to.”
Kozyrev also said he thought Deng Xiaoping, who ruled China in the 1980s and continued to exert influence until his death in 1997, was much better prepared to lead the reform process than any Soviet or post-Soviet leaders, including Yegor Gaidar, the architect of Russia’s controversial economic reforms in the 1990s.
