July 27, 2012

What China Learned from the USSR's Fall

A. Greer Meisels, The Diplomat

AP Photo

Looking at CCP reactions to the collapse of the Soviet Union and attempting to understand how they chose to intuit these "lessons learned" seems to demonstrate that the CCP has been engaged in a continual learning process culminating in a type of policy-planning plasticity. Each of the “solutions” the CCP came up with to militate against Soviet-style collapse addresses some area where they found the Soviet Union to be lacking. Perhaps China’s most important lesson was how to become an adaptive authoritarian regime when so many people had lost faith in Marxism-Leninism, the socialist economy, and communist orthodoxy.

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TAGGED: Soviet Union, Russia, China

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