HONG KONG -
As China prepares to welcome Russian President Vladimir
Putin for a three-day visit starting on Thursday,
beneath the surface a debate is simmering about a
long-forbidden topic: what really caused the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991.
Was it the result of
peaceful evolution following the introduction of ideas
of Western democracy, human rights and other alluring
but superficial artifacts of Western culture? Or, was
it, finally, the lack of faith in socialism? That latter
possibility flies in the face of the accepted Chinese
line, and holds serious implications for Chinese
socialism in a nation undergoing breathtaking economic
and social changes. But it is being discussed, albeit by
a few people, and very quietly at this stage.
Over the past few years, Chinese scholars have begun
to re-examine the cause of the collapse of the former
superpower Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc
from an independent and academic perspective. Their conclusions
do not necessarily coincide with the established
version published in the Chinese Communist Party's
propaganda leaflets. These intrepid Chinese scholars may
have set foot in one of the biggest forbidden political
zones.
According to well-placed sources,
some Chinese academics now embrace the opinions of
two American researchers who argue that the breakdown
of the Soviet Union resulted from the emergence of
various interest groups within the establishment, groups that
had lost their faith in socialism. This contrasts with
the generally accepted official position that the
collapse of the Soviet Union was brought about by a
so-called "peaceful evolution" by Western powers. It has
been learned that some communist officials share the
view that loss of faith in socialism is what ultimately
brought down the Soviet state.
Economics Professor David M Kotz and journalist
Fred Weir conducted thorough research on the elites in
the Soviet Union's ruling class from 1991-96, documented in
their book Revolution from Above - The Demise of the
Soviet System (Routledge 1997). They found that
long before the Soviet Union's fall, people in power had
only a weak belief in socialism, and fewer than 10% of those
interviewed were classified as socialists. In sharp
contrast, some authoritative Soviet polls at that time
showed that the majority of the people at the grassroots
still believed in the socialist system.
With a large
number of case studies, the two analysts asserted that
some elements within the top echelon had already turned
into capitalists as early as 1987, accelerating the
country's disintegration in 1989. (The collapse of the
Soviet Union was formalized on December 26, 1991, when
the Supreme Soviet officially dissolved the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics.) And today some say that
China is already largely capitalist.
Simply put,
Soviet-bloc communism devoured itself. Both the former
Soviet Union and the Eastern European bloc got rid of
communism for good when the ruling communist parties in
the respective countries stepped down without foreign
intervention or mass popular uprising.
However, political commentators within China warn that
discussion of this issue in China is unlikely to go deeper
or become wider at this time, since it diverges
greatly from Beijing's official account. Beijing has
long maintaining that it was the so-called
"peaceful evolution" - the injection of Western ideologies such
as human rights and democracy into the communist masses -
that eventually eroded the minds of the Soviet people,
who finally gave up socialism.
"Guarding against
peaceful evolution" has always been an essential
argument supporting Beijing's resolute handling of the
June 1989 pro-democracy movement, the bloody crackdown
on peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in
Beijing. If the conclusion drawn by the two American
experts is confirmed and publicized, Beijing's
propaganda about its so-called resolute halting of the
subversive and pernicious movement in the interests of
national peace and stability will be weakened.
In addition, such a new conclusion -
people's lack of faith in socialism - would further
invalidate Beijing's crackdown on a student-led
pro-democracy movement in 1987, when slogans vowing to
fight corruption were denounced by the authorities as
threats to social stability. Such new conclusions would
also lead to much reassessing and fault-finding in some
decisions of the late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, who
forced his political rivals, two former party
secretaries - Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang - to bow out of
the political arena, on the grounds that they were too
feeble in handling rising dissenting voices.
As
with these above-mentioned issues, the question of
whether Deng made serious mistakes in handling the
peaceful pro-democracy movements is also regarded a
hot-button issue, since the current leadership still
needs to increase its authority and legitimacy by vowing
to follow Deng's course.
Currently, party chief,
state president and military commander Hu Jintao stands at a
critical juncture, an intersection of history. Wether
the moderate reformist will become Mikhail Gorbachev II,
as some observers predict, remains to be seen.
Gorbachev, some say, sowed the seeds of a new Soviet
Union, ultimately the seeds of its destruction, by
calling for limited reform - glasnost (openness,
transparency) and perestroika (restructuring),
but he didn't gauge popular sentiment, he still sought
to improve the socialist system. Thus it was Boris
Yeltsin who actually presided over the collapse of the
USSR.
On the other hand, the reunification of
East and West Germany - resulting from the collapse of
communist East Germany - is also a sensitive issue
because it reminds Beijing of the thorny issue of
Taiwan. In the eyes of Beijing, Taiwan is a renegade
province, but for many Taiwanese it is a de facto
independent, self-governing state with a Taiwanese
identity, quite separate from the mainland.
The
latest issue of the influential magazine Sanlian Life
Weekly (Sanlian Shenghuo Zhoukan) carries a
feature on the 15th anniversary of the reunification of
East and West Germany. The report reveals that many
Germans now complain about the hastened reunification,
to which many attribute high unemployment and a
deteriorating social order. The magazine covers domestic
and world news, carrying in-depth articles and describes
itself as a kind of Chinese equivalent of Time magazine.
Although its circulation is only about 200,000 copies,
it is popular and attracts considerable advertising.
In its October 4 edition, it said, "Despite East
German leaders having said the Berlin Wall was built in
order to resist invasion of the Western powers, its
greatest function, in reality, was to stop people from
East Germany escaping to West Germany." Although this
notion has been widely recognized, it is still a very
new statement to appear in the media of a socialist
country.
Political experts caution that the
German experience could send a warning message to
Beijing that an inappropriately implemented
reunification with Taiwan is not necessarily better than
the maintenance of the status quo.
Not long
before he finally resigned as commander-in-chief, former
president Jiang Zemin stressed that "the Taiwan issue
could not be indefinitely protracted" and some academics
even proclaimed that indefinitely protracting the issue
in effect means agreeing with Taiwan's independence. But
a recent meeting in Beijing on Taiwan affairs held after
the party plenum reportedly fine-tuned Taiwan policies,
and set out to avoid radical and divisive wording in
official documents.
The German reunification
experience brings to mind Hong Kong, which also has been
plagued by a weak economy and high unemployment since
its handover to Beijing in 1997. Hong Kong is even
assailed by Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian as a
failure of Beijing's so-called "one country, two
systems" policy, which is often used by Beijing to lure
Taiwan back into the embrace of the motherland. To a
larger extent, whether Taiwan will turn toward Beijing
depends on whether Beijing can find a way to win the
hearts and minds of people in Hong Kong.
Nonetheless, it is natural that even a leader as
great as Deng Xiaoping sometimes failed to see the truth
hidden in some issues, or made fatal decisions. To err
is human. If the current Chinese leadership can endeavor
to extract the truth from partisan thinking and
rhetoric, and to renew its understanding of key issues
like the collapse of the Soviet Union, it will be taking
a great and a positive leap forward.
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