History will remember Mikhail Gorbachev as the man who destroyed Soviet Communism by trying to save it. Despite his subsequent veneration by some Western liberals, Gorbachev was no liberal himself. A true believer in state socialism, he nevertheless recognized that the Soviet system was grossly inefficient and that an entrenched and unchecked Party-State bureaucracy posed a fundamental obstacle to meaningful economic reforms. After a few false starts, Gorbachev concluded that the only way to achieve “perestroika” (reform) was to permit a measure of “glasnost” (openness). Like many an out-of-touch autocrat, he believed that he could anticipate and control popular sentiment, directing it against the hidebound apparatchiks who opposed his vision of a “kinder, gentler” form of Communism. Instead Gorbachev unleashed a torrent of criticism and resentment that quickly weakened and then destroyed the very foundations of the Soviet system.
Xi Jinping is no Gorbachev. He presides over an economy that is still growing rapidly, a population whose expectations continue to rise, and a political elite that has not yet lost faith in itself and in its right to rule. But, like Gorbachev, in his zeal to defeat his opponents and bolster the questionable legitimacy of a one party authoritarian system, Xi may have tugged on a thread that could cause things to unravel with surprising speed.