Paranoia from Soviet Union collapse haunts China's Communist Party, 22 years on

In the heyday of Sino-Soviet socialist brotherhood in the 1950s, Chinese liked to say that “today’s Soviet Union is tomorrow’s China”, as Beijing faithfully followed Moscow’s every footstep in development.

But since the collapse of communist rule and the Soviet Union in early 1990s, the old saying has become an evil omen haunting China’s communist leaders. 

And there are renewed shudders among the Beijing leadership following a warning from President Xi Jinping calling for the need to pay greater attention to the dramatic events in Moscow more than two decades ago.

Significantly, officials ranging from top central government ministers to heads of grassroots party organs have been called on to watch a four-part DVD documentary about the historic events. 

The video, In Memory of the Collapse of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, is jointly produced by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection,  the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences  and its affiliated Research Centre of World Socialism. It tells the story on how a once great power stumbled to become a second- or third-class nation. 

The video blames Mikhail Gorbachev’s radical moves to introduce Western-style democratic reform and to relax the party’s monopoly control of ideology and also Boris Yeltsin’s rush to privatise state-owned enterprises as the main reasons behind the collapse of Communist rule and the dismantling of the Soviet empire.