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in 1991, despite their ideological sympathies for the USSR’s leadership, the Chinese Communists expressed their willingness to work with the new Russian government under Boris Yeltsin
Under Xi Jinping, studying the Soviet experience has become an important part of the party's propaganda, because, for Chinese observers, the main thing that happened in 1991 was not the collapse of a massive state, but the loss of power by the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU).
The Soviet-Chinese summit in Beijing in May 1989 escalated the “Tiananmen crisis” precisely because relations with Moscow and Soviet leaders' reactions to events in Beijing were very important to Chinese leaders.
In China, it was believed that in the Soviet Union, a sit-down hunger strike in the country's central square, during a major visit by a foreign leader, was simply not possible. As proof of this, examples were given of the violent suppression of demonstrations in Alma-Ata, Minsk and Tbilisi. The fact that the CPSU would disband in two years and that the situation in the USSR would be out of control was unthinkable in Beijing at the time, as an analysis of the available documents shows that the events of 1991 came as a complete surprise to the Chinese.
Among the main reasons for the collapse, according to the Chinese studies, were those associated with the weakening of the party. Namely, the pervasive corruption, the detachment of the its elite from the common people, the emerging consumerism, and the formalism and bureaucratic tendencies of party ideologues and agitators, which led to a total disbelief in the policies imposed from above.
Chinese scholars have been rather harshly critical of the structure of the Soviet economy, above all its centralization, which dates back to the position of Mao Zedong in the 1950s. Another problem for the USSR was the bias towards the military-industrial complex and heavy industry, which led to acute shortages of consumer goods.
the Soviet Union was forced to carry out reforms amidst a still ongoing confrontation with the West – and powerful cultural and informational pressure from the outside – which against the background of the crisis in the economy and political system caused a strong “faith deficit” in the ruling party, ideology and broader country. Chinese scholars credit Mikhail Gorbachev with moving away from a costly confrontational line in relations with the West, but believe that the moment for change was already lost and the USSR paid the price in the 1980s for a long period of striving for global hegemony.
A recent article by Xi for the party magazine Tsushi says: “The Russian Communist Party seized power with 200,000 members, defeated Hitler with two million members and lost power with nearly 20 million members.” This happened, according to Xi, because “ideals and convictions disappeared” and “no one came out to defend the party with arms in their hands.”
The same idea, reference to Xi Jinping's views, was expressed in one of a series of documentaries devoted to the 20th CPC Congress entitled ‘A Strong Country Should Have a Strong Army.’
Appealing to the negative experience of the CPSU-USSR is actively used by the CCP leadership in propaganda as an argument in favor of the impermissibility of any reforms related to the weakening of the role of the party in the life of society.