526 { China’s Quest
with the United States. The Soviet Union should have shifted economic pri-
ority to agriculture and light industry after World War II in order to raise
standards of living. It did not do this, but continued to give priority to heavy
industry and defense right up to the time of Gorbachev. In part this was a
function of the inevitable struggle between capitalism and socialism. But it
was also due to the Soviet Union’s “rivalry with the United States for hege-
mony.” This rivalry for hegemony with the United States was, according
to Gao Di, a major reason for the Soviet Union’s current situation. Deng’s
twenty-four-character directive spoke to this determination not to allow the
United States to turn China into a rival and force it to assume a heavy defense
burden that would hobble its development.
A book published by the Foreign Ministry just after the demise of the
USSR laid out the international situation in which China now found it-
self.^52 China now confronted a protracted, probably decades-long, complex
offensive by the Western capitalist countries, which were using economic,
political, cultural, and military means to cause people—especially party
members—to doubt the superiority of socialism. The most critical arena
for confronting this western offensive was internal. Party organization
and leadership should be strengthened, and at every level the party should
grasp ideological education and struggle. Externally, the increasingly in-
tense competition among states, some bourgeois and some proletarian, for
“comprehensive national power” was a chief manifestation of the clash be-
tween socialist and capitalist systems. Western efforts at peaceful evolu-
tion took place under the threat of superior Western military power. The
international situation was currently tending toward reduction of tension,
but the possibility of “extreme challenges,” including those of a military
nature, could not be ruled out. It was absolutely essential for China to de-
velop great “comprehensive national power” if it was to survive as a socialist
state. But while maintaining great vigilance against “peaceful evolution,”
China could not close itself off from the world. To do that would deny China
the advanced technologies and knowledge it needed to develop comprehen-
sive national power. If opposing “peaceful evolution” meant closing China,
“the more you oppose, the poorer you become, the more you oppose, the
more backward you become.”^53
The collapse of the CPSU had a profound and enduring impact on the
CCP worldview. Twenty-two years later, in 2013, a six-part, 100-minute video
program titled Silent Contest and apparently intended for political educa-
tion of PLA officers and CCP cadre was leaked and posted on the web.^54
The program argued in detail that the United States had defeated its greatest
enemy, the Soviet Union, by nonmilitary means, including especially ide-
ological subversion, and was now trying to do the same thing with China.
Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” that had erased Soviet Communist Party mem-
bers’ awareness of domestic and foreign class enemies and the attempted