- Messages
- 9,817
- Reactions
- Nation of residence
-
- Nation of origin
-
Parts I agree with, other parts are simplistic take given China's vast difference to the USSR.
Even if there was full transmission of Mao type leadership ideology post-Mao (i.e no economic reform arc like happened) and PRC evolved into some larger version of North Korea (though not as extreme, given its raw size).....there are things the PRC has set up within itself that prevents something like there being a wild swing from Brezhnev to Gorbachev.
While such an entity exists politically, it is never contained, it will always have some large enough notable impact. The USSR was never contained, nor is Russia in some absolute sense.
The USSR was unique (to say PRC then and now).... in that it packaged russian tsarist (and then bolshevik) expansionism into constituent republics (the SSRs, of which the USSR was the union of them) and had these fault lines baked in. FDR also pretty stupidly handed over a bunch on a platter to Stalin in the last few years of WW2 regarding Eastern Europe's political fate.
Simply saying it was a fiscal strain from over-centralisation and dysfunction (Moscow + GOSPLAN), that too the AFG war was what did it in, is very simplistic....I find these relative minor contributions compared to the larger inertia set in from the Tsarist times that the bolsheviks subsumed and that Gorbachev became unwilling to enforce (on a system that had grown accustomed to this and then essentially cascaded). People either package and prioritise their final identities with the larger nation for that nation's sustenance....or they have not and do not. Then it becomes a matter of how much you incentivize and/or coerce them....and how big of a % they are in the end and if there are ready made seamlines like the SSRs.
One can look at the new union treaty attempt (that ended up in the botched form of the CIS) in the early 1990s for example....it was the 3 baltic states and Armenia and Georgia where even the registered voters with the CPSU boycotted it.....unlike central asia, azerbaijan, belarus and even Ukraine. These are the tiers of these things you see when the old system cover is made defunct (its why a ton of Russians revile Gorbachev).
PRC took a different approach, mirroring a much more unitary state and with the Han majority % as well that backed it up (though the word homogeneous is over-used and simplistic). This is why its the people's republic of China....not a union of republics.
This needs a longer look into both Sun Yat Sen era and also the Qing empire (given the most dominant Qing emperors realised as Manchu minority and what had eventually happened with the Mongols before them....that each ethnic group had to be part of the larger Chinese people and nation officially and as much as possible in practice).
So its existence as cohesive entity is much more guaranteed, containment just becomes relative affair of definitions after that given its size.
It certainly has vast (mounting) challenges, it just saw 5 trillion in market cap wiped out in a few years, it has next to no long term liberal soft-power institutions (that the west relies on along with immigration from rest of world to put into concert in its own way a long time), it made bad investment choices into real estate (now coming under huge strain as well).....and there are the other things Ferguson and others more readily mention. Xi Jinping made a lot of things worse as well.
But its not the same country as USSR....and containment is a catchphrase. The West has its own set of challenges too.
With PRC, there are simply huge genies out of the bottle (that weren't the case with the USSR) and already impacted given the economic transition and capital accumulation on top of all of this (the political existence and raw size of population). PRC also took lessons from USSR case and continues to adapt/respond with its echelons in various human endeavours too.
West will certainly conduct and manage some containment policy...and the west has several things going for it (the island chain from Japan to Vietnam.....alliance with India, vast wealth stockpiles, huge soft power, institutional heft and so on)....but it wont be some drastic result like seen with USSR in 1980s. It will have some success and failure and China will also have some success and failure and I dont think either side will outlast another politically here in some complete way. There will just be longer term cycles that come into play given the sizes here.
