Ed Villantoy

One of Xi Jinping's first acts as China's leader was to ask an audience of senior officials why the Soviet Union had collapsed. It was January 2013, at the Central Party School, and he was speaking to the incoming class of the Central Committee. His speech wasn't published until 2019. He found the answer in ideology. The Soviets, he said, completely negated their own history, negated Lenin, negated Stalin, and thinking was thrown into confusion. Party branches stopped doing anything, he continued, and the military slipped out of the party's control. The result, he said, was that a party that big scattered like birds and beasts, and a country that big fell apart. Kevin Rudd (@MrKRudd), a former prime minister of Australia who got an Oxford PhD on Xi, quotes such passages in a 2022 essay that Foreign Affairs republished last week. His argument is that although Xi may not be a Stalin, he certainly isn't a Gorbachev: the last Soviet leader, who let the party's history be openly criticized and then saw the party fall apart. For 30 years, China watchers in the West believed that ideology died with Deng Xiaoping, who told a party meeting in 1981 to stop arguing about theory. As China got richer, the thinking went, it would loosen up. Xi concluded the opposite. In that January speech, he said that the Mao and market eras should not be contrasted to discredit one or the other. It was a party's repudiation of its own history that caused the Soviet party to collapse, he believed. Only two days into office, he told the Politburo that faith is like calcium in a communist's soul. Without it, you get rickets. Then he acted on what he had learned from the Soviet collapse: a decade of purges, reasserting party control of the military, a study campaign for all party members. So as the West waited for a Chinese Gorbachev, Xi's first lesson in power was that Gorbachev is the way a communist party dies. All that he has built since then makes sense as an attempt to avoid that fate.