https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18899/communist-china-gorbachev
Social commentary by Chinese Communist Party organs continue to urge members to be vigilant against the West’s strategy of “peaceful evolution,” meaning the eventual adoption by the Party of reforms that might sap it of its revolutionary aggressive stance against liberal democracies.
Under Xi’s tutelage, the CCP strengthened its role in the life of the ordinary Chinese citizen. President Xi galvanized CCP bureaucrats to accelerate a mass migration of China’s rural peasantry to urbanized environments. Consequently, tens of millions of Chinese were forced to learn new skills in manufacturing jobs. This transformation helped lift many out of abject poverty, thereby expanding China’s middle class as well as the domestic market for Chinese goods. The urbanization process also helped the CCP to better control China’s huge population by concentrating people in cities.
The USSR had failed to improve the quality of life of the Soviet citizenry. CCP leaders possibly reasoned that, because of this failure, Soviet citizens began to challenge Communist rule…. As openness became the norm, people in the USSR quickly saw that citizens in Western countries had freer and more comfortable lives.
Instead of imitating Gorbachev’s “Glasnost” (political openness) China constructed the “Great Firewall” which filters all traffic on the Chinese Internet. Chinese authorities also ban the citizenry access to Facebook and Wikipedia.
China conducts its diplomatic relations even with foreign countries strictly on a transactional business basis. The CCP did not seek to export its revolution violently, as did Iran. Beijing also refused to allow its few allies, such as Pakistan, to drain its national resources. That was another self-inflicted burden that Moscow shouldered: its burden of bankrupt colonies in Eastern Europe.
China, instead, is offering its own model of governance — a one-party system, tight control, a controlled economy, social stability rather than individual freedoms, internet control, and “to protect the dominant role of the CPC” — to the world as a viable alternative to the American system…. China remains resolute in its campaigns against any movement that might possess the energy to compete with the CCP, whether the Falun Gong movement or Christianity.
China’s leaders apparently still worry, otherwise they would not be investing such enormous resources in domestic espionage and repressing their own people.
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) commentators reacting to the death of Mikhail Gorbachev blamed the former Soviet leader for the demise of the Soviet Union. Hu Xijin, former editor of the CCP’s Global Times, wrote that Gorbachev garnered praise in the West “by selling out the interests of his homeland.” Xiang Ligang, a hardline journalist on international relations, claimed that Gorbachev was responsible for the war in Ukraine and unspecified disasters to follow. State controlled academia echoed similar themes. Beijing-based Renmin University Political Science Professor Shi Yinhong said: “The Chinese Communist Party is very critical of [Gorbachev], believing that he betrayed the Soviet Union.”