My Take | Gorbachev taught communist China how to survive
- The last Soviet leader, who has died at the age of 91, served as a negative example of what could go wrong when a communist system tries to reform, thereby inadvertently contributing to China’s rise
On May 18, 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev ended his visit to China; and his counterpart Zhao Ziyang met protesting student leaders in Tiananmen Square in a failed bid to convince them to stand down.
Zhao and his followers were open to what may be called the Chinese versions of glasnost and perestroika. But before the year was out, Zhao was placed under house arrest, for the rest of his life.
The Tiananmen tragedy and the collapse of the Soviet Union would convince the communist leadership that to survive, it needed to learn from Gorbachev, that is, to avoid all the mistakes he made.
In the West, the last Soviet leader, who has died aged 91, has been celebrated as the statesman who helped end the Cold War and secure America’s unipolar dominance. Among Russians and Chinese, though, the view is much more negative.
Part of the underlying rationale of Vladimir Putin for the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been to restore the empire lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
For the Chinese, in a most paradoxical way, Gorbachev had been a great teacher, in a wholly negative sense.
