China Posthumously Trashes Gorbachev for ‘Cozying Up’ to West

China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday chose to eulogize Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, by calling him “naive and immature” for “cozying up” to the Western world instead of using an iron fist to hold his empire together.

Gorbachev died in Moscow of a “severe and prolonged illness” at the age of 91 on Tuesday.

“While the Western politicians praised his historical role for bringing his country closer to the West and ending the Cold War, Chinese observers considered him as a tragic figure who catered to the U.S. and the West without principle, made severe mistakes in judging the international situation, and caused chaos in domestic economic order, all of which are reminder to other countries to stay cautious about any attempt of ‘peaceful evolution’ by Western forces,” the Global Times huffed.

Of course, the Chinese Communist Party would never allow any of its media organs to come right out and say so, but their scorn for Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika — openness and reform, a controlled liberalization of the Soviet Union — flows from China’s conviction that it did the right thing by murdering young dissidents at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

There were some reform-minded figures in the Chinese Communist Party during Gorbachev’s reign, and there were some nervous types who thought liberalization might be inevitable. The Tiananmen Square massacre crushed those dreams of reform, welding the rifts in the Chinese Communist Party shut with the hot blood of slaughtered students.

Chinese leaders resolved to increase political repression in tandem with economic “openings” to the free world. They counted on foolish Western globalists to make them rich in the vain hope “engagement” would liberalize China the way it supposedly liberalized Russia. Instead, the exact opposite happened over the next 30 years, as America and Europe were infected by China’s authoritarian ideology.

The Chinese government felt obliged to give Gorbachev a pat on the head for improving relations between China and the Soviet Union, but the Global Times saw the more effusive praise flowing from Western politicians and media as proof that Gorbachev was just a hapless patsy for the hegemonic U.S. and NATO alliance:

Some Chinese observers referred to Gorbachev as “the one bringing ruin upon himself.” Over the past decade, Russian top leader Vladimir Putin has been learning from the lessons of the Soviet leader in the 1990s, adhering to the country’s own path, observers said.

“Gorbachev made compromise with the West by accepting Western ideologies, turning against the socialist system but now Putin put the national interests above all,” Zhang Hong, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Wednesday. 

Russia walked down a path where it had to bear some pain and then returned to its own path of development, which is not blindly following the path of the West, Zhang said. 

“As a lesson for China’s own governance, the Communist Party of China upholds its own socialist path with Chinese characteristics, underscoring political maturity and sobriety,” the Global Times boasted.

The Chinese Communist paper even blamed Gorbachev for the “tragedy” of current Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine because Gorbachev “made compromises without principle in discussing Germany’s reunification with Europe and the U.S.” 

In other words, the Ukraine war is all Gorbachev’s fault because if he did not let the West walk all over him, Ukraine would never have become independent, so Putin would have not found it necessary to invade.

“The lesson China should draw from such tragedy is to remain vigilant toward the Western forces conducting ‘peaceful evolution’ in other countries, as no matter it’s Western ideas or plans, Gorbachev had catered to the West without principle, which also weakened the Soviet Union’s influence and strength in international affairs,” one of the Global Times’ unnamed “experts” declared.