For China, USSR’s 1991 Collapse Is Still News It Can Use
Beijing has assiduously studied the events that led to the end of an empire. But today, it sees largely what it wants to.
Lost in translation.
Photographer: Catherine Henriette/AFP via Getty Images
The end of the Soviet Union remains one of history’s great political Rorschach tests — a series of events with manifold causes and endless repercussions, where every government sees what it wants to see. For the United States and much of the West, that was the defeat of communism and the seemingly inevitable crumbling of a sclerotic dictatorship. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, it was a historic catastrophe that left ethnic Russians stranded and proved that tinkering with reform leads to self-destruction.
No country, though, has sought to interpret the events that led up to the implosion of the empire with quite the dedication seen in China, where the past failures of a powerful neighbor are a present-day preoccupation that feeds post-mortem studies, books and mandatory lectures. Today, the resounding message from this near-feverish focus is the need for a tight political grip. It’s a conclusion that reflects the instincts and ambitions of President Xi Jinping as much as the realities of the 1980s and early 1990s: Other lessons, not least on how all-out control can lead to excessive risk-taking and a blindness to shortcomings, are less keenly absorbed.