The Crisis Deepens } 515
militant, antiliberal attitude. Externally, China would follow a nonideologi-
cal and equanimous approach. China’s media and officials would not express
support for measures or proletarian dictatorship in other countries, nor
express sorrow if and when those efforts of proletarian dictatorship failed. In
terms of the slant taken by China’s media, coverage was to be objective, re-
porting on events without siding with the healthy Marxist-Leninist forces of
foreign countries, much less revealing CCP pleasure at the successes of those
forces. Moreover, China would move quickly to establish normal diplomatic
relations with whatever governments succeeded to power after the collapse
of communist regimes. In line with this, shortly after Ceaușescu’s execution,
Qian Qichen sent a message to Romania’s new government saying that China
respected the Romanian people’s choice and hoped for continued friendly re-
lations with Romania.
Internally, the CCP moved to further inoculate the PLA against any dis-
loyalty to the party that might be inspired by events in East Europe. On
December 27, 1989, following the defection of Romania’s military from party
control, the PLA’s General Political Department distributed a circular to com-
manders. Against the background of the unsettling changes in East Europe
and the continuing influence of bourgeois liberalism, the circular said, it was
necessary to launch a campaign to inculcate the Four Cardinal Principles
throughout the PLA. Some within the military were still confused or uncon-
vinced of the superiority or even the very future of the socialist system.^27
The Collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union
Hot on the heels of the collapse of East European communist regimes, the
most senior communist party, that of the USSR, began its slide toward ex-
tinction. 1990 and 1991 saw an increasingly desperate struggle over the fu-
ture of the USSR. There were three main groups in this struggle: 1) liberal
communists, led by CPSU General Secretary and USSR President Michael
Gorbachev, who wanted to develop a liberal and democratic variant of com-
munist rule—an approach not too different from those of Hu Yaobang or
Zhao Ziyang; 2) conservative communists who felt Gorbachev’s liberal path
was an illusion that would lead ultimately to the demise of communist rule
and socialism—an approach similar to that of Li Peng, Yao Yilin and other
CCP hardliners; 3) noncommunist Russian nationalists, led by Boris Yeltsin,
who favored Russian secession from the USSR and formation of a liberal,
democratic system and a market economy.
Yeltsin, initially a protégé of Gorbachev, emerged as the leader of the non-
communist liberals during 1990. In May 1990, Yeltsin was elected chairman of
the Congress of People’s Deputies, a new organ of supreme state authority set
up by Gorbachev in 1988 in an effort to outflank his conservative antireform