How was the collapse of Soviet Union explained in Chinese media?
There are multiple factors contributing to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a very important one being Khrushchev throwing away Stalin’s knife and Gorbachev’s open betrayal of Marxism-Leninism.
If problems are to occur, they are bound to occur inside the Communist Party .
In 1989, the People's Daily reported:
The East German people are now strengthening their unity under the leadership of the party.
The collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a sudden, rapid, and unexpected event, but for China, it was an event of paramount importance.
Unlike Western historiography of the Soviet Union, which tends to focus strongly on economic stagnation, China's explanation for the collapse was almost entirely political, and the man to blame was Gorbachev.
Unlike the West, where Marxist theory and Communism were far from the mainstream, Marxist dogma and worship of Lenin and Stalin remained strong in the CCP. It was of paramount importance for the two decades after the Soviet Union's collapse that the Chinese government rationalized the collapse in the eyes of the Chinese people and especially members of the CCP - so important that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was commissioned by the government to "research the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union" in the year 2000.
Initially, the response of Chinese press outlets and publishing houses to Soviet collapse was not entirely consistent. China, like most of the world, was blindsided by the collapse of a political body in 1991, which just two years earlier seemed stable. Some authors even praised Khrushchev for being an early reformer and blamed Brezhnev for stagnation. One of the most widely distributed explanations in the early 90s was Liu Jing's conspiratorial Materials on the Western World’s Foreign Strategies and Tactics, which blamed the collapse on sabotage by Western propaganda and NGOs. However, in the 90s and 2000s, the CCP's official historiography on the collapse of the CPSU solidified. China Fangzheng Press, the Television Arts Center of the PLA Academy of the Arts, China Academy of Social Sciences produced a series of audio tapes, radio and TV documentaries, and articles which would form the basis of the CCP's talking points regarding Soviet collapse in the party's press outlets.
Over time, the CCP's view shifted to one that demonized Gorbachev as the single most guilty actor, who allowed anti-party groups to infiltrate the CPSU and destroyed the paramount power of the party. The CCP's view can be summed up by an often repeated quote, "the Soviet Union lost the knife of Stalin" - originally stated by Mao during the Sino-Soviet split.
Unlike Western analyses, which focus heavily on economic issues, the approach of Chinese media and academia focuses almost exclusively on the flaws of the top leadership. This is very Marxist, and moreover very Chinese. In Chinese historiopgrahy of the imperial period and beyond, the top leader is blamed for almost all failures. It was no different in the CCP's explanation of Soviet collapse, which focused on Gorbachev's inconsistency, incompetence, and duplicity.
The most widespread Chinese documentary on the Soviet Union's collapse was CASS's ominously named Preparing for Danger in Times of Safety, which played in the late 2000s. The documentary asserts that press and political liberalization brought about the end of political unity:
In 1994, famous Russian author Bondarev commented when reviewing the situation in this period, “In six years, newspapers and magazines accomplished what the best-equipped European army at the time was not able to do when invading our country with fire and sword in the 1940s. That army had top notch equipment. However, they lacked one thing – hundreds of thousands of publications with germs.
Gorbachev's dogmatic adherence to openness is blamed as the central factor in this thaw, while Gorbachev's flaws as an out of touch, all-talk leader are emphasized:
Instigated by Gorbachev’s “democratization,” “openness,” and the principle of a multi-party system, nationalist sentiment was increasingly running high in the republics of the Soviet Union. The centrifugal tendency of the narrow nationalism was growing and the party organizations in the republics of the Soviet Union were also moving away from the central government.
It was reported that Kuptsov, the CPSU Central Committee’s Vice Chairman, said on February 28, 1991, that only one year after amending the constitution, about 20 political parties were formed at the Union level, and a coalition of more than 500 political parties was formed at the Republic level. The majority of them become political forces that brought about the ultimate resignation and the dissolution of the CPSU.
Nikolai Ryzhkov, who was once the chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, said that Gorbachev “was not good at, did not like, and did not want to listen to others’ opinions, but only liked to talk endlessly about himself, with lots of fabulous but empty words. He liked to talk about boring ideas and make them sound like the best things in the world.” Others recalled that, while Gorbachev’s original intent was to accomplish “remarkable achievements,” when he took office, he viewed the impact of his speeches and writings as his “remarkable achievements.” He was not interested in constructing correct reform policies, did not take practical measures to achieve his goals, and did not implement the plans by exerting a lot of hard and meticulous efforts. His leadership style was to “start with talking and end with talking.” As a result, many resolutions made in the early stages of the perestroika were not carried out. Due to his working style of empty talk without pragmatic approaches, many problems of the party and the country were not only not resolved, but rapidly accumulated and worsened.
Perhaps surprisingly to a Westerner, the coup plotters of the 19th of August coup, who are demonized in Western historiography as ossified reactionaries with no chance of success, are glorified as heroes in Chinese historiography who failed because of "insufficient conviction in socialism".
However, Gorbachev is not entirely to blame. Two other factors are cited: the destruction of Marxist-Leninist ideology after the death of Stalin, and the sabotage of the USSR by the West, borrowing from Liu Jing's ideas. As the documentary states, "The CPSU was the only party which became rich at its own funeral".
Brezhnev is the primary actor who takes the blame for the CPSU's turn to luxury. He is derided as a technical, by the book leader with insufficient knowledge of ideology and theory, and therefore no inclination to enforce strict Marxist morals on cadres. This led to the emergence of a "new bourgeoisie" in the Soviet bureaucracy which used its privileges for economic benefit, contra Marxist ideas. This perception was shared by the Soviet people:
Right before the collapse of the CPSU, an agency conducted a poll of the general public asking the question “Whom does the CPSU represent?” The result showed that 7% thought the CPSU represented the working people; 4% thought it represented industrial workers; 11% thought it represented all party members; and 85% thought the CPSU represented the bureaucrats, cadres, and government officials.
Finally, the US takes some of the blame for broadcasting radio free into the Soviet Union, putting "human rights" pressure on Gorbachev, which Gorbachev caved to, and for funding NGOs. According to Pravda, there were 30,000 NGOs at the time of the CPSU's collapse, which the CCP paints as almost uniformly anti-Soviet.
In 1983, the U.S. Congress passed legislation to fund “Project Democracy.” By 1989, the funding that Congress provided to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) alone had reached $25 million. This funding was mainly for “developing democracy” and supporting opposition in socialist countries, primarily the Soviet Union. The West used ideology infiltration and the “human rights” campaign, along with huge amounts of capital, to support those who were dissatisfied with the CPSU, helping to establish NGOs, providing financial aid to produce publications promoting bourgeois liberalization, encouraging them to grab power from the CPSU, and providing political shelter.
It should be noted that Chinese historiography about Soviet collapse could have taken a very different direction. However, in 1989, China had its own reformist-hardliner political struggle, which ended the complete opposite way as the Soviet Union's. Chinese hardliners under Li Peng forced out reformists under Zhao Ziyang after it was clear that reform wasn't working to calm the Tienanmen crisis, then the government embarked on a crackdown. Over time, the CCP convinced itself that not "abandoning the knife" was the key to their survival.
Liu Jing, Materials on the Western World’s Foreign Strategies and Tactics.
Chinese Academy of Social Science. Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Preparing for Danger in Times of Safety.
Garver, John W. The Chinese Communist Party and the Collapse of Soviet Communism.