What the Chinese Communist Party Learned from the Fall of the USSR

Recently, I read a speech from 2013 by Xi Jingping, the General Secretary of China’s Communist Party, and China’s leader.

In one respect, it’s turgid and boring; it’s for insiders, other party members.

But in another, it’s fascinating.

In one part, Xi goes on and on about how there have been different periods in the Communist rule of China, and none of them must be repudiated. He doesn’t say that everything that was done was right, but that the earlier struggles and attainments were necessary for the later attainments.

There is no repudiation here of Mao. Perhaps Mao’s actions didn’t always work as expected, but the rule of the Chinese Communist party made China better, even before the reform period.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

(Yes, there was a big famine and the cultural revolution, but there were plenty of famines and purges before Communist party rule. What is important about Communist party rule (though Xingping doesn’t say this) is that this was the last famine.)

This very careful reaching back to Mao and, also, to Deng Xiaoping, the seminal leader of the reform movement, is in large part a response to the fall of the Russian Communist party.

Xi and the Chinese Communist party believe the USSR fell mostly because they stopped believing in their own ideology and their own history. The Communist party theoretically had the power to hold the USSR and Warsaw Pact together, but simply refused to use the Red Army and the KGB to do so.

Gorbachev was a communist believer, sure, but he repudiated most of what had been done in the past. A smart reformer, instead, Jingping seems to believe, but makes the necessary reforms without repudiating the past.

Equally, they do not repudiate Marxism. It brings a bit of a smile to the face of a Westerner, but the Chinese Communist Party is absolutely firm on the claim that what they are doing is still Marxism. It is Socialism with Chinese characteristics, and it is aiming towards a goal of full socialism. That will probably take many generations, but that’s the goal, and they are making progress.

So to Xi, he is the heir of Deng. Mao, Marx, and all the Communist leaders of China’s past. The party is doing things differently, yes, but strategy and tactics evolve, even as the goal (communist utopia) does not.

This is a near religious goal, as the translator notes:

One of the most striking aspects of this speech is the language Xi Jinping invokes: Party members must have “faith” (xìnyǎng) in the eventual victory of socialism; proper communists must be “devout” (qiánchéng) in their work; and Party members must be prepared to “sacrifice” (xīshēng) everything, up to their own blood, for revolutionary “ideals that reach higher than heaven” (gémìng lǐxiǎng gāo yú tiān).

Religions are special cases of ideology: a subset. All successful ideologies, especially hegemonic ones, must create true believers. When they stop believing, they stop being willing to enforce the ideology (and all ideologies, including ours, democracy and capitalism require enforcement). When they stop being willing to enforce their ideology, it will die.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

So here, again, Xi is seeking to shore up the Chinese Communist Party. For it to continue to rule, it must not repudiate the past, nor its own ideology. Party members must truly believe and be willing to do whatever it takes to move the Party towards its goals, even if that means blood or death.

So I suggest readers take a moment and pop over and read the speech in full. It’s long, yes, but this is the leader of the world’s second most powerful state, the country that is threatening America’s hegemonic rule. What and how he thinks, and what the Chinese Communist Party believes, matters.

And one thing they think is that they’re not going to make the same mistakes their Russian communist brethren made.