In keeping with the New Year greeting of Professor Stephen Young, Director of CRT, in His grace, God has granted us the gift of the New Year within ourselves. With the strength and grace so bestowed upon us, we can become peacemakers. At any moment, we can accept responsibility and take action. God is waiting for us to stand up; He has made it possible for us to set right what has gone wrong. It is in this spirit of solidarity that, in recent years, CRT has placed particular emphasis on East–West dialogue, intercivilizational exchange, and the study of systemic transformation in post-socialist, reforming, and transitional societies, including China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Presented below are the two most recent contributions to this ongoing endeavor by Dr. Đinh Hoàng Thắng, CRT Fellow.
First Essay:
Collapse on the One Hand; Sustainability on the other: Why did the Soviet System fail in Russia and Eastern Europe but Socialism in China still exists – at least until now?
Đinh Hoàng Thắng
Fellow, The Caux Round Table
In our lifetimes, global political history has witnessed contrasting trajectories between leading socialist systems. The Soviet system in Russia and its client states in Eastern Europe rapidly collapsed while in China a socialist system of governance and economy has survived through controlled reforms under the direction of a dominant centralized Party and State authority apparatus. The question is inevitable: How could systems born from the same ideological orientation arrive at such different outcomes?
The quick answer is that history is not teleological – not in any way driven by fixed forces towards one necessary end state. Rather, history, even understood as directed by dialectical materialism, is an open-ended, unplanned process of actions and connected reactions, a never-ending process of adjustments, change and evolution. The “now” of any moment in history has proceeded from a “past” and is shaping the “future”.
Thus, even socialism as an ideal social arrangement cannot be monolithic. Socialism in China was not destined to replicate socialism in Russia.
Thus, the inconsistent evolutions of socialism in Russia and China depended on different decision-making dynamics. The Russian transition out of Stalinism took a different course than did the Chinese transition out of Maoism. As President Xi Jinping continually insists Chinese socialism evolved under the guidance of “Chinese Characteristics”. The two processes of transition took remnants of an established order and retained some, reorganized others, contested alternatives, and eventually re-configured governing institutions into a new politics.
We then need to consider what “Russian” characteristics” drove the evolution of socialism in Russia and what specific “Chinese” characteristics have produced the Xi Jinping model of political legitimacy and economic development in China.
1. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: Failure Born from an Accumulation of errors, leading to Crisis and then to Loss of Direction
Before collapsing, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies had endured a prolonged period of economic, political and cultural stagnation. Centrally planned economies reached the limits of their regulatory capacity: an inability to provide incentives for innovation, operational inefficiency, and growing disconnection from real market demands. In parallel, ideological legitimacy evaporated, at first slowly and then dramatically. Once appealing slogans lost their power to persuade the public of what was right and what was wrong because the gap between regime propaganda and lived reality had grown too wide. When the propaganda lost its moral power, the Soviet regimes lost their ability to command obedience and respect.
More importantly, the final phase, one of “accumulation of shortcomings and errors”, of these intertwined Soviet systems brought about not strength, but introduced self-destructive forces. Reforms came too late, or were only half-hearted. Political structures lost cohesion as rejection of their authority spread across society . Such socialism developed what could be called “existential fatigue.” Confidence in the endurance of the model decayed psychologically long before collapse arrived politically. When such internal contradictions reached a certain threshold, instead of forming a coherent and effective trajectory into the future—a directional alignment capable of holding the system together—those internal contradictions produced fragmentation, confrontation, and eventually sudden disintegration.
Neither the Soviet Union nor the Soviet states of Eastern Europe collapsed from any single political incident. Their fall came from institutional gridlock, which had taken decades of dysfunctions to accumulate system-destroying critical mass. Once legitimacy crumbled and the state lost its capacity to mobilize society, even a moderate shock was enough to bring down a structure already hollowed out from within. In other words, the Soviet–Eastern European collapse resulted from the failure of their transition out of original orthodoxy, a systemic failure to forestall the accumulation of disappointments, resentments, malingering obstructions, profiteering, and other refusals of obedience. These Soviet regimes failed to envision and implement a new path capable of reconciling contradictions and reviving historical vitality.
We might then consider what “Russian” characteristics contributed to the failure of the Soviet regime. An obvious consideration is the Muscovite tradition of cruel rulers and compliant sycophants. Russia arose from a social structure dualism of the Tsar and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church where no freedoms existed either in politics or religion. Thus, Russians have carried into the present a national character of servile accommodation. Inventiveness, pragmatism, checks and balances, decentralized flexibility have never characterized Russian culture, society or politics.
2. The Chinese transition out of Maoism: Surviving Through Accumulating Power and Controlling institutional Assignments
Sharing the same socialist ideological foundation, China nonetheless chose a different transitional path when the shortcomings of Maoist orthodoxy became evident. After the traumatic disruptions of the Maoist era, China gave itself a reform program marked by strong pragmatism. Unlike the Soviet Union, China moved earlier and more decisively in restructuring its economy while still retaining a highly rigid hierarchy for its politics.
What mattered most was not just generating economic growth, but the creation of a new basis for regime legitimacy—one derived from delivering development, improving livelihoods, and utilizing nationalism as a powerful binding force. China has also advanced further than many nations in building sophisticated tools for social control, deploying security and digital technologies extensively to manage dissent.
As a result, China has formed what may be called a “directional alignment of power”: a trajectory in which the state holds absolute authority while refusing to abandon the imperative of development. Ideology has been “pragmatized”: socialism remains the rhetoric, but the underlying logic is one of power, national strategy, and economic advancement. This helps China avoid an Eastern European-style shock—at least in the short term.
This successful transition was made possible through the deployment of “Chinese” characteristics, policies borrowed from 2,000 years of imperial order, where individual dynasties might have risen to power and then collapsed but a habit of showing pragmatic concern for social order from family, to village, to district and finally the state was reinvigorated again and again.
3. The Chinese Communist Party’s Survival Until Today Does Not Guarantee Its Future Durability
However, the continuing survival of Chinese socialism should not be mistaken for a guarantee of its sustainability. Beneath its seemingly stable surface lies mounting pressure: slowing growth, demographic decline, widening inequality, social tensions, and sustained international strategic competition. All of these dynamics create new, or exacerbate existing, contradictions within the system, contradictions which, day by day, are accumulating the power to destabilize China’s future.
Just as the Soviet Union once believed itself “too strong to fall,” China is not immune to the forces which dictate history. Chinese socialism did not escape history but began its adjustment to historical realities before the Russian Soviet leaders did. Socialist Russian and Eastern European regimes allowed history to push them into corners where collapse was their only future. But history is still grinding away at Chinese Socialism. More challenges to the regime are to come.
So, if one must explain why Soviet Russia and its Eastern Europe client states disappeared while Communist China still endures, the reasons are:
- Russia and Eastern Europe accumulated dysfunctions and weaknesses, leading to, first, a loss of reform options and then collapse
- China sustained centralized ruling power through pragmatic economic reforms producing continued interim survival
But history remains open to change and new developments. The decisive question for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China is: the coming accumulation of circumstantial realities will generate what kind of a governing regime?
Written December 2025 for the Caux Round Table which, in 1986, was founded in Caux, Switzerland; is incorporated in the United States of America; and has its Administrative Office in, St Paul, Minnesota