The Crisis Deepens } 527
“Westernization” that had produced Soviet weakness had all facilitated a
sustained and long-term campaign of US subversion. The result was the dis-
solution of the Soviet Union. This had resulted in the United States shifting
its spearhead toward China. The years 1978–1989 had been a “honeymoon” in
US-PRC relations because of common opposition to the Soviet Union. Now
the United States was using a vast array of weapons to subvert China: radio
and television broadcasts, cultural and academic exchanges, the Internet,
support for Tibetan or Xinjiang rebels, and even the village election program
of the Carter Center in Atlanta
The trauma of postcommunist Russia generated a good deal of popular
support within China for continuing CCP rule. Russia’s trials under Boris
Yeltsin in the 1990s were many. The economy fell to half the Soviet-era level.
The social welfare net disintegrated. Organized crime boomed. Former party
apparatchiks seized privatized, lucrative state assets. Russian protests were
ignored by the West as East European states one after another joined NATO.
Witnessing Russia’s troubles, especially when juxtaposed to China’s economic
advance that revived circa 1992, many Chinese concluded that replacing a
highly centralized communist party power system with a decentralized sys-
tem of democracy led, after all, not to orderly advance but to decline and even
anarchy. Lingering memories of China’s own experience during the Cultural
Revolution, when relaxation of central control had been paralleled by chaos,
reinforced these conclusions about Russia’s course. Even Chinese who had
once seen Gorbachev’s perestroika as an inspiration and guide for China
changed their views and reluctantly concluded that the CCP under Deng, not
the CPSU under Gorbachev, had followed the correct path. Continued cen-
tralized rule by the CCP was the best way to borrow heavily from the Western
countries.
When Russia under Vladimir Putin in 2000 began turning away from
the democratizing efforts of the previous decade, rebuilding a strong cen-
tral authority, and distancing Russia from the West and from the idea of
participating in a single global community, CCP leaders, and many ordi-
nary Chinese, saw further vindication of the path the CCP had chosen.
Even Russia now recognized this and was embracing a China-like course.
The Soviet system could and should have been reformed under centralized
Communist Party direction—as had been done in China.
Chinese drew from the Soviet collapse very different conclusions than
those drawn by Americans and other Westerners. The combination of the
Beijing Massacre with the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union had a deep impact on Western, and perhaps espe-
cially American, perceptions of China under the CCP.^55 Before those events,
China had been perceived as an exemplar of wise and steady reform under
far-sighted communist leaders. Afterwards, CCP-ruled China was seen as a
political anachronism, and a cruel one at that.