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communist rule) in July had inspired reform struggles in other East European
countries. So too had a midyear G-7 summit in Paris that declared support
(including debt relief) for political reform in Eastern Europe. CCP leaders
compared that friendly stance of the G-7 to that Group’s post-6-4 stance when
it had recommended suspension of World Bank loans to China.
The CCP initial impulse was to damn Gorbachev’s betrayal of the
East European proletariat and the international communist movement.
Conservatives insisted that open polemical struggle be waged against
Gorbachev’s revisionist betrayal of the international proletariat, just as Mao
had struggled against Soviet revisionism in the 1950s. If Gorbachev and the
Soviet Union had stood firmly behind the embattled East European prole-
tarian states, they might well have been able to defend the “gains of the pro-
letariat” as ably as the CCP had done in China in June, China’s hardliners
maintained. But without Soviet support, those states quickly succumbed.
Following Ceaușescu’s execution, the Politburo convened a series of meetings
to discuss East European developments. Gorbachev and his policies were uni-
formly excoriated.^24 Chen Yun declared that “the weakness of Gorbachev’s
ideological line is that it is pointing in the direction of surrender and retreat.
Our party cannot afford to stand idly by and watch this happen.” Elder Wang
Zhen seconded Chen’s view and called for open criticism of Gorbachev’s “re-
visionism.” Gorbachev had deviated from the socialist path, Wang said. Jiang
Zemin, just appointed in July as secretary general and designated successor to
Deng as paramount leader, maintained that Gorbachev must be held fully re-
sponsible for the setbacks of the East European proletariat.^25 Gorbachev as the
same type of “traitor” as Leon Trotsky and needed to be held “fully respon-
sible” for the state of affairs in Eastern Europe, Jiang Zemin said. Fortunately
for the CCP, Deng Xiaoping would veto the call for open polemical struggle
against Gorbachev’s “betrayal.”
By early 1990, it was obvious to CCP leaders that Gorbachev was either a
deliberate traitor who had infiltrated the proletariat’s ranks (some believed
that he was a CIA mole) or merely a blunderer whose egregious errors caused
grave injury to socialist and the international proletariat cause. In February
1990, when Gorbachev announced his intention to revise the Soviet consti-
tution to create a competitive multiparty electoral system, thus ending the
CPSU’s seventy-two-year-long monopoly on power, articles in PRC media
denounced “bourgeois multiparty democracy.” Such arrangements were
sham class-based democracy run by the bourgeoisie, and far inferior to
socialist democracy under the CCP. These polemics avoided, however, direct
reference to the USSR or to Gorbachev and his bold constitutional reforms.^26
The CCP’s traditional dual-track approach meant that polemics against
Gorbachev’s betrayal of the proletariat conducted at the party-to-party level
need not interfere with the establishment of normal diplomatic relations of
the postcommunist successor states of East Europe at the state-to-state level.