Xi Could Be the Gorbachev of the PRC

Xi is on course to be publicly shamed and humiliated by the new leadership in the manner witnessed during the Mao era.

- M.D. NALAPAT

Between Gorbachev and Xi, no greater contrast is possible. One devolved the power of his position as Supremo of the CPSU to a fault; the other has taken over all the key centers of the CCP. Yet, given the differences between the CCP and the CPSU, the destructive impact of Xi on the PRC is likely to be the same as the impact of Gorbachev was on the USSR. While the latter needed just five years, the latter may need fifteen or more years to have a similar impact on the CCP.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was chosen as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by the party elders in 1985. They saw him as the apparatchik most suitable to ensure better relations with the West, primarily the US. They did not understand that "better relations" with the US, an implacable existential foe of the Soviet Union the way China now is for the US, implied that the US was secretly delighted by the way in which Gorbachev was weakening the power of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Once Glasnost (transparency) was introduced into the hitherto opaque functioning of the Soviet government, the public saw for themselves the rubbish within more, much more, clearly. In contrast, Xi has been so opaque even about issues as obvious as the leakage of the Cov-19 virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.