China Would have Fallen Apart had USSR Not Disintegrated First, Vavilov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 – By the 1980s, China was experiencing many of the same problems that the Soviet Union was and likely would have fallen into pieces had the USSR not disintegrated first and had Beijing not learned from that event what it must not allow to happen, Russian sinologist Nikolay Vavilov says.

            In a comment for Caucasus Today, Vavilov says that before the USSR collapsed, “the domestic political problems in China were no less than with us” in the USSR. “The same ‘glasnost’ was taking place and the rehabilitation of the victims of ‘the cultural revolution which led to the events in Tiananmen Square” (kavtoday.ru/article/6581).

            According to the sinologist, “both the USSR and China at practically the same time found themselves in a period of great political turbulence. However, the army suppressed the actions of the students in Tiananmen,” and that made all the difference for the very different futures of the two countries.

            The suppression of the student rising led to “’the freezing’” of democratization for several years, and “during this time, China was able to observe how democratization was affecting the USSR. The Soviet Union disintegrated,” he continues, “and a series of intra-state conflicts began.

            This led the Chinese leadership to conclude that it must “defend the Communist Party and consensus within the elites. And this became a kind of vaccine against the disintegration of China. Had the USSR not gone the way it did, China itself would have collapsed after only a year or two,” Vavilov says.