Editor’s Note for Wednesday, August 31, 2021
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
My thoughts today:
Just as we were preparing to send our daily newsletter to you yesterday, news broke that Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader and disolver-in-chief of the Soviet Union, had died.
The Chinese government gave a very lukewarm assessment of the Russian leader who ended the Cold War at the daily Foreign Ministry briefing (English, Chinese), a message repeated, without elaboration, by state media Xinhua:
Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev made positive contribution to the normalization of relations between China and the Soviet Union. We mourn his passing and extend our condolences to his family.
The tepid nature of the message is not at all surprising. After all, Vladimir Putin and Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 have a very similar view of recent history. In 2005, the Russian leader called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” In a leaked 2012 speech, Xi said:
Gorbachev announced the disbandment of the Soviet Communist Party in a blithe statement. A big party was gone just like that. Proportionally, the Soviet Communist Party had more members than we do, but nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.
So our Word of the Day, naturally, is: nobody was man enough to stand up and resist (竟无一人是男儿，没什么人出来抗争 jìng wú yīrén shì nán’ér, méishénme rén chūlái kàngzhēng).
(I must apologize that “nobody was man enough” is a repeat! It was our Word of the Day on June 22, when news first emerged that Xi would emerge from his COVID cocoon for the first time in 893 days and dare to visit the viral swamps of Hong Kong.)
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—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief
