If problems are to occur, they are bound to occur inside the Communist Party. - Deng Xiaoping

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Because Deng Xiaoping tightened political control whereas Gorbachev loosened it, because nationalism and Communism in China worked together, because China had a smaller "pool" of intellectual dissidents, because Deng's reforms weren't even that liberal from an economic standpoint, and finally because the Chinese "reformers" crushed their nascent political reform movement instead of encouraging it.

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In 2000, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was contracted to "research the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union", leading to a volume of work in China which was later consolidated into the CCTV documentary "preparing for danger in times of safety". Much of the documentary was propagandistic, attributing the fall to "insufficient conviction in Marxist ideology", while other parts drew on Liu Jing's conspiratorial *Materials on the Western World’s Foreign Strategies and Tactics*, written less than two years after the Soviet Fall. Liu Jing's conspiratorial tract blamed the entire fall on Western intelligence operations, most notably the creation of "30,000 NGOs".

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However, the CASS documentary also touched on another point. When Khrushchev began his reform process, Mao Zedong stated that the "Soviet Union had lost the knife of Stalin". CASS attributed the CCP's survival and CPSU's demise to the CCP retaining "the knife", in that it was able to purge those who didn't follow the party line and crush those outside the party who posed a threat.

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Political Reforms

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This leads us to our first reason for the CCP's post-Cold War survival - it never opened up politically. Actually, the 1976-89 period was a gradual process of *political closing*. The Mao era was ironically more "democratic" than the Deng era, in the sense that mass participation in politics and collective decision making at the local level were far more widespread. Little state security apparatus besides mobs of Maoist youth existed to eliminate political opponents, the People's Armed Police not even existing until 1982. The later Mao years were a period of chaos and economic disaster for China, as Maoist youth monopolized railway lines, disrupted production and transport, and purged intellectuals, and closed schools. It was no surprise that Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues, who represented the "right wing" of the Communist Party and were largely the victims of the purge, distrusted popular politics and sought to create a bureaucratic-administrative state vaguely along the lines of Japan.

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Deng Xiaoping's regime consistently suppressed all political expression outside state outlets. This was not limited to non-party members, as Deng discouraged Communist officials from their traditional barnstorming and agitation. He saw the high-flying political life of earlier Communist officials as the cause of the chaos of the late 60s and early 70s, and organized the CCP into a well-ordered and ranked collective. Similar to the Japanese bureaucracy, sourced from prestigious universities, the Chinese bureaucracy in the Deng years coveted well-educated young people, particularly engineers, spawning the "fourth generation of leadership" that would preside over China's most technocratic period 2 decades later.

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In contrast, Gorbachev's reforms stressed political opening and invited criticism of the CPSU. Gorbachev's reforms represented a political loosening, which spiraled out of control, while Deng's reforms were a political tightening.

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Nationalism

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Gorbachev also had the misfortune of running against the tide of nationalism. The Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic state that had been waging a costly Cold War against richer adversaries for decades. As a result, minority politicians mobilized separatism for their own purposes once Gorbachev's political and press reforms gave them a platform, and Russians themselves saw the other Soviet Republics as a financial burden.

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The situation in China couldn't have been more different, as the CCP's strongest cards even after the economic failures of the 60s and 70s were its nationalist credentials. According to the CCP's founding mythos, Mao's 1949 victory had thrown off the Western-imposed unequal treaties (actually, they were ironically dissolved by the Japanese puppet state led by Wang Jingwei, and never reinstituted after the war). Subsequently, the Mao defeated a coalition of Western powers in Korea, and reconquered Tibet and Xinjiang. The PLA then won a border war with India, and waged skirmishes against the Soviet Union over land taken from the Qing in the Treaty of Aigun. While actually less significant than that of the KMT, the CCP's resistance against the Japanese was glorified in plays and cinema constructed by state propagandists, foremost among them Mao's wife Jiang Qing. It was not uncommon in the 1980s and 90s for ordinary Chinese to believe that it was not the KMT or even the Americans who played the greatest part in defeating Japan, but the CCP.

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While most Western Communist parties were internationalist, the CCP was foremost a nationalist movement. Much like the neighboring North Korean system, the Chinese system could morph into something entirely un-Communist and still retain credibility as a result.