A man walks past cardboard cutouts of Chinese President Xi Jinping, US President Donald Trump, Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin in downtown Moscow on Aug. 7, 2019. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP via Getty Images)
Chinese Ambassador to France Lu Shaye angered many countries with his televised remark that the ex-Soviet Union countries did not have sovereign status. However, this seemingly inadvertent remark reveals a deep-seated fear the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had for the last three decades—that the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and demise of the Soviet Party will happen again in China, experts said.
In an interview with French television network LCI on April 21, Lu claimed that former Soviet states had no “effective status” in international law.
When asked whether Crimea belongs to Ukraine, Lu replied, “In international law, even these ex-Soviet Union countries do not have the status, the effective [status] in international law, because there is no international agreement to materialize their status as a sovereign country.”
The statement provoked outrage in former Soviet countries Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia and shocked the world. To appease the public, the Chinese Foreign Ministry claimed that Lu’s statement on Ukraine was not a policy announcement but a personal viewpoint.
However, Wu Guoguang, a senior researcher at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of China’s Economy and Institutions and former think tank member for CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, believes that Lu’s words reflect the innermost thoughts of the Communist Party’s top brass.
“Who dares to say that what Ambassador Lu, who was once the director of the Policy Research Bureau of the Central Foreign Affairs Office, said is not in line with the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy?” Wu wrote in an article published by VOA on April 27.
Chinese Communist Party’s leader Xi Jinping (L) talks with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron as they arrive for the official welcoming ceremony in Beijing on April 6, 2023. (Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images)
Lu is probably among the most knowledgeable regarding high-level diplomatic intentions among the CCP’s foreign envoys. Lu has worked beside Xi Jinping and was director of the Policy Research Bureau of the Foreign Affairs Leading Group Office of the Central Committee between 2015 and 2016. The head of that team was Xi, according to Wu.
Why does the CCP’s upper echelon look down on the former Soviet states?
A tweet by François Godement, director of the European External Relations Council’s Asia and China program, revealed on April 22 the veiled agenda of the CCP.
“Indeed, while Lu Shaye may be an outlier in form, he may also be saying aloud what is an implicit Chinese position. After all, read Xi’s 2012 comments on how Gorbachev destroyed the Soviet Union.”
‘Profound Lessons’ From Collapse of Soviet Union
Anders Corr, founder of Corr Analytics and publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, told The Epoch Times on May 11 that the leaders of the CCP are concerned that the disintegration that beset the Soviet Union could also hit China.
“The USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] could not keep up economically and militarily with the West, which sanctioned it heavily. The same could happen to China,” he said.
In December 2012, during a visit to Guangdong Province, Xi, who had just stepped into the position of CCP leader, told party insiders that the CCP must learn the “profound lessons” of the Soviet Union, where political corruption, ideological heresy, and military disloyalty led to the fall of the ruling Communist Party.
“Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? A major reason is that its ideals were shaken,” Xi said, adding that “finally, Mikhail Gorbachev—the final leader of the Soviet Union—announced the dissolution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with a single word, and the vast Party was gone.”
Xi also repeated the “profound lessons” in an internal speech in early 2013.
In 2013, the Discipline Inspection, China’s Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and CASS’s subsidiary, the World Socialist Research Center, jointly produced a four-part DVD documentary titled “20 Years of the Soviet Union’s Death,” saying that the collapse of the communist regime made the once-powerful Soviet Union fall to a second or third-class country.
This documentary attributes the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Soviet Communist Party to two main causes: Gorbachev’s introduction of Western democratic reforms that loosened the party’s tight ideological control and Boris Yeltsin’s vigorous drive to privatize state-owned enterprises.
Chinese officials at all levels, from central department leaders to grassroots party committees, were required to watch this DVD.
CCP ‘Leader of Everything’
The CCP has strengthened its grip over all spheres of society in the fear that the regime will follow the same path as the Soviet Communist Party.
In 2017, the CCP revised its party constitution, adding a unique paragraph: “The Party is the leader of everything: the Party, the government, the military, the people, the academia, the East, the West, the North, the South, and the Middle.”
In December 2014, Xi claimed at a conference on the work of colleges and universities that the party should dominate the leadership of colleges and universities. In this atmosphere, Chinese university campuses have seen incidents of party reporters monitoring professors’ classes, students reporting professors’ failure to toe the party line, and cameras installed in university classrooms.
The CCP has also established party branches in state-owned enterprises and private enterprises.
Businessman and Communist Party member Jiang Xipei (C) is flanked by Zan Shengda (R), ranked 39th on the Forbes list of top 100 richest people in China, and Shen Wenron, who is ranked 39th on the Forbes list, at a press conference at the 16th Communist Party Congress in Beijing on Nov. 11, 2002. (Peter Parks/AFP via Getty Images)
At the end of 2008, Alibaba Group had three second-level party committees—one party branch, and two direct branches—with a total of 2,094 party members; Baidu and Tencent both established party committees in 2011, with 2,500 and 3,386 party members, respectively; and Jingdong has set up 154 party branches nationwide, with 10,730 party members, according to a report by Chinese portal Sina on July 1, 2017.
The CCP has also placed party branches in foreign companies, such as the Chinese branch of French cosmetics company L'Oréal SA and the China joint venture of French car maker Renault SA, according to the Chinese language edition of The Wall Street Journal.
The Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily said that by 2016, some 75,000 foreign companies had set up party branches, accounting for 70.8 percent of all foreign companies in China.
The CCP’s one-party totalitarian rule has garnered growing public discontent. Last November, a fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, triggered a white paper campaign at the Nanjing Media Institute that quickly spread to a nationwide wave of demonstrations, with people in 21 provinces and students in 207 colleges and universities responding. Hundreds of people in Shanghai chanted, “Take Down the CCP.”
Suppression of Private Enterprise
As the above-mentioned documentary said, the demise of the Soviet Union could be partly blamed on the privatization of state-owned enterprises. Therefore, the CCP launched a crackdown on private enterprises and expanded state-owned enterprises.
In November 2020, the IPO of Alibaba’s Ant Financial Services was halted at the last minute by the CCP regulators. This was the beginning of a full-scale clampdown on private companies by the Communist Party, hitting private companies in the technology, finance, gaming, education, and real estate sectors. The campaign has eliminated more than $1 trillion in market value from Chinese companies worldwide.
Yao Yang, director of the National Development Research Institute of Peking University, said in a forum at the end of February that a study on government procurement data showed that many private enterprises could not get purchase orders from governments, Chinese financial media Caixin reported on March 1.
More and more companies are being forced to nationalize. In the three years from 2018 to 2021 alone, 90 listed A-share companies were transformed from private to state-owned enterprises, and more than 400 companies changed their leadership, with an average of one listed company changing its CEO every three days.
Alibaba's co-founder Jack Ma (R) looks at Tencent Holdings' CEO Pony Ma during a celebration meeting marking the 40th anniversary of China's "reform and opening up" policy at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Dec. 18, 2018. (Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images)
For the private sector predators, the CCP has also adopted the method of acquiring “golden shares” to control them. On Jan. 4, a state investment fund entity set up by the State Internet Information Office acquired 1 percent of Alibaba’s subsidiary, Guangzhou Green Education Information Technology Company. The government’s plan to acquire Tencent’s golden shares is also under discussion, according to The Financial Times.
Economic Recession
The CCP’s prescription for suppressing private enterprises to avoid the Party’s demise, however, has pushed the Chinese economy into recession.
In the first 11 months of 2021, some 4.37 million small and medium-sized enterprises in China closed permanently, more than three times the number of new businesses started in the same period. The private sector, the backbone of China’s economy and employment, is in decline, and small and micro enterprises, in particular, are disappearing at a rapid pace, South China Morning Post’s report said on Dec. 30, 2021.
In 2022, China’s economy grew by only 3 percent, the slowest year of GDP growth since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The unemployment rate for young people spiked to a record high. According to an April 19 report by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the unemployment rate for Chinese youth (16 to 24 years old) reached 19.6 percent in March.
Due to the official falsification of data, the actual recession of China’s economic growth may be much more severe.
Corr pointed out that the CCP’s excessive control over China’s private sector reduces its efficiency and ability to innovate, “hurting China and the CCP in the long run.”
Jenny Li has contributed to The Epoch Times since 2010. She has reported on Chinese politics, economics, human rights issues, and U.S.-China relations. She has extensively interviewed Chinese scholars, economists, lawyers, and rights activists in China and overseas.
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