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China’s military
ChinaMilitary

Lessons learned: how the Soviet Union’s collapse led Xi Jinping to demand military loyalty

  • CCTV documentary details events that shaped Xi, and mistakes he learned to avoid
  • But an expert cautions that a loyal army doesn’t mean a ‘capable fighting force’

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Ahead of China’s 20th party congress, a documentary series has highlighted major influences on President Xi Jinping, including the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Photo: Xinhua
Minnie Chan
The collapse of the Soviet Union held at least one major lesson for Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to a documentary series aired by state broadcaster CCTV.

One episode of the 15-part series Pursuit of Light is named after one of Xi’s guiding principles: “A strong country must have a strong army.”

In it, political scientists said Xi’s emphasis on the relationship between the army and the implosion of the former Soviet Union informed his sense of crisis and pressure at home and overseas.

It highlighted Xi’s efforts to revive the “Red Army spirit” in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) amid geopolitical shifts – an approach aimed at fusing the Communist Party to the military based on the philosophy “the party controls the gun”.

The motto stemmed from another saying, “political power grows out from the barrel of a gun”, coined by Mao Zedong, who led the predecessor to the PLA, the Red Army, against the Kuomintang.

“A top-down and unified command system is a military must. The Soviet Communist Party’s decision to abolish political education is one of the key factors that led to its collapse,” said Jiang Tiejun, a Chinese military theorist with the Academy of Military Sciences (AMS), one of the PLA’s top academies, who was interviewed for the documentary.

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