Chinese economic reforms were not accompanied by political reforms. Not then. Not later. Possibly not ever.

What China learned from the end of the Cold War

by Sean Durns

On Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War came to an end. Beijing wasn’t celebrating.

While one Cold War was ending, another was beginning. China’s communist rulers watched with alarm as their rival’s rule came to such an ignominious end. The Soviet Union had been integral to the rise and eventual victory of the Chinese Communist Party after the country’s nearly two-decade-long civil war. But the two powers eventually became rivals , fighting to be the preeminent power in the communist world.

Despite their rivalry, Beijing was alarmed by the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, China’s rulers were so worried that "they commissioned tens of thousands of internal papers, round tables, and even documentaries on the issue," as the journalist Jamie Palmer noted. The CCP, Palmer observed , "is obsessed with the collapse of its former rival and ideological partner."

The party has invested considerable time and effort into studying what went wrong. Its conclusion?

Never reform. Ever.

It is, as Palmer has pointed out, the wrong conclusion. Without political reforms, economic efforts will eventually be hindered. If inadvertently, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev came to this conclusion. Gorbachev sought to rescue an ailing economy by enacting political reforms — but those very same measures opened the floodgates that led to the dissolution of the USSR and the end of his rule.

Under Chinese ruler Deng Xiaoping, who ruled from 1978 to 1989, China enacted major economic reforms. But contravening Western hopes , they were not accompanied by political reforms. Not then. Not later. Possibly not ever.

There isn’t a history of democracy or Western-style political liberalism in China. It doesn’t exist. And the autocrats who rule China aren’t about to let it appear anytime soon. Thanks to technological advances, and enabled by Western corporate greed , China is now constructing what can fairly be called the largest police state in world history. A massive surveillance state has been built , buoyed by Beijing’s fears of facing the same fate as their brethren in Moscow.

The CCP is not only ruling with an iron fist, but it is holding with a firm grip on to its rule. As evidenced by its growing campaign against minorities and dissidents, both on the mainland and abroad, China is moving in the precise opposite direction of where the USSR was in the years before its collapse.

Beijing’s expanding military might, including its burgeoning nuclear arsenal, is but more evidence of its very different direction. By contrast, Gorbachev dramatically cut military spending and sought to negotiate away much of the USSR’s nuclear capacity. But as Palmer and other China watchers have noted , Gorbachev is seen "not as a far-sighted reformer but as a disastrous failure, a man who led his country, and his party, to national calamity."

Indeed, the period that followed the end of the USSR saw Russia plagued with territorial losses, a GDP that dropped 40%, and rising death rates. For Russia, the 1990s were an awful experience.

For a country such as China, which has a long history of bloody rebellions and civil wars, a similar situation is an unthinkable risk.

Sean Durns is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.

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