Mao’s China, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War: a Reinterpretation

Abstract

The article attempts to demonstrate, although both China and the former Soviet Union have been under the long-time rules of Communism, they have very different cultural traditions and historical backgrounds, which decide their different political institutions and socialist developments, their contrasting reactions to the Cold War, and their various measures in adapting to the post-communist era. During his reign in China, Chairman Mao Zedong chose to completely close the country to international fluence, for achieving his imperial ambition of becoming an emperor-like ruler. The situation continued until the death of Mao, when China began to open-door and reaching global societies. On the other hand, the Soviet Union since the death of Joseph Stalin started to evolve into a more liberal and tolerant country, while engaging in more contacts with the West and the rest of the world. The end of the Cold War was in fact a contribution made by the socialist states as exemplified by China and the former Soviet, because they increasingly found that their ideologies could not have sustained the survival of communist authoritarianism, so they must throw the system out of the history and reconcile with the whole world. The end of the Cold War was thanks to the changing political landscape of like a process of internal disintegration (like the Soviet Union) and transformation (as China), which had little to do with mutual competition between the capitalist West and the socialist bloc. The Cold War was neither an US project for painstakingly achieving global hegemony which involved mainly one character of the American, nor an episode of competition codirected by the two superpowers while others were merely marionettes or onlookers. The end of the Cold War was much credited with Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, Gorbachev’s glasnost, Mao’s closed-door, and Deng’s open-door. To conclude, the demise of the Cold War in the early 1990s was a victory of the Western democracy, as claimed by many scholars before, in reality, it is not historically correct.