Mikhail Gorbachev helped make China the power it is today

Beijing viewed liberalisation with dismay and vowed not to repeat the mistake, as Sean O’Grady explains

Gorbachev with Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader at the time, in Beijing in 1989 (AFP via Getty)

Mikhail Gorbachev had a revolutionary global impact, and the reverberations of his actions are still being felt. Much has been spoken about his role in reforming Russia, ending communism, freeing central and Eastern Europe, and ending the Cold War. He ranks with Nelson Mandela as an agent of peaceful change.

Much less remarked upon is how he influenced events in the “other” communist superpower, the People’s Republic of China. There, Gorbachev was regarded not as some sort of secular saint but as a rash, even foolish man. As they observed the internal effects of perestroika and glasnost, followed by the chaotic dismantling of the USSR, the gerontocrats of Beijing reached their own conclusions about the Gorbachev method of progress.

It is telling and poignant that the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 were partly inspired by Gorbachev’s policies and the freedom movements that were springing up in the communist Eastern bloc. Indeed, one of the main reasons why Deng Xiaoping and his fellow Politburo members wanted the students, artists and workers out of the square was that Gorbachev was coming, and they feared unrest and severe loss of face.