This year marks the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. For the Chinese Communist Party, that cataclysmic event radically altered how it governed China. Of all the foreign observers of the implosion of the Soviet Union, nobody has devoted as much attention to and tried as hard to extract lessons from the fall of Soviet communism as the Chinese Communist Party.
In retrospect, much of the party's post-1991 survival strategy can be traced, intellectually, to the lessons it drew from the Soviet collapse. Much of its success, both at home and abroad, has been the result of its subsequent strategic adaptation and tactical flexibility.
So what were the lessons party leaders learned 20 years ago?
The most important was, without doubt, that economic failure caused the Soviet rulers to lose their legitimacy and the capacity to hold their empire together. To avoid a similar failure, the party itself must focus its energy on economic performance. The effect of this epiphany was as revolutionary as it was instant. Shortly after the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin, Deng Xiaoping went on his historic tour of southern China and reignited China's economic transformation. Conservatives within the party, who resisted his economic reform in the 1980s, did not put up a fight because they knew they had lost the political battle. Without the Soviet collapse, one may argue, the re-launch of China's economic reform in 1992 would not have occurred.
In the years since, China's stunning economic growth - with its gross domestic product rising, unadjusted for inflation, from 2.18 trillion yuan in 1991 to 39.8 trillion yuan (HK$48.3 trillion) in 2010 - has bolstered the party's political legitimacy and given it enormous resources to maintain power and expand its influence abroad.
An equally critical lesson the party learned from the Soviet collapse was that a communist party would be committing political suicide if it attempted to introduce democratic reforms to gain a new source of legitimacy. The communist system is too brittle, Chinese leaders concluded, to withstand the political shocks generated by democratising reforms. Even a tiny opening in the political system could unleash an uncontrollable chain reaction.
The corollary of this democratisation-is-bad lesson was obvious. In the ensuing two decades, the party not only abandoned its promising liberalising initiatives begun in the 1980s (such as strengthening the National People's Congress, reforming the legal system, relaxing restrictions on civil society and experimenting with local elections), but also vigilantly suppressed the small, albeit vocal, pro-democracy community within China.