AT A TIME when unrests are erupting at an unprecedented rate across China, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told the Guardian in an exclusive interview that the Chinese are "nearing" political change.
(Photo: Former Soviet head of state Mikhail Gorbachev speaks during a Moscow press conference on Aug. 17. Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images)
Gorbachev, the last Soviet head of state who is known for his political reforms that eventually led to the weakening and downfall of the Soviet Communist Party, said in an hour-long interview:
There will be a moment when [the Chinese people] will have to decide on political change and they are already nearing that point.
During his six years of rule as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Gorbachev had attempted to reform the communist state's political and social structure, in a fashion similar to that of many Chinese activists nowadays, who seek to reform the bureaucracy of today's largest communist state in the world.
Despite garnering the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, Gorbachev, 20 years later, said that he shouldn't have gone on "too long" in trying to reform the communist party.
The Guardian reported :
He should have resigned in April 1991, he said, and formed a democratic party of reform since the communists were putting the brakes on all the necessary changes.
With the 80-year-old former leader hung onto the Soviet Communist Party until it dissolved in summer 1991, Gorbachev said that his biggest regret is not having withdrawn from the communist party.
I now think I should have used that occasion to form a new party and should have insisted on resigning from the communist party. It had become a brake on reforms even though it had launched them. But they all thought the reforms only needed to be cosmetic. They thought that painting the facade was enough, when actually there was still the same old mess inside the building.
Those sentiments bare potent lessons for today's would-be reformers: there is another way.
