No, of course not. China will have its own range of plusses and minuses in managing its growing power. The very different culture will mean a way of operating that will not copy or accidentally resemble the USSR. China wants world power, maybe not domination. It has the silencing of dissent in common with all nations that do not have the right to free speech as one of their most desirable attitudes.
In the West, we must recognise that what seems a fundamental right to us is not within the culture of all nations. That is the reason why China can bring such obedience from its people, such as the killing of flies and the one-child policy in the past. But it values its cultural role in the Arts, perhaps. Art is one way that ideas can be generated subtly. The USSR dampened and damaged artistic expression.
I don’t think China is the new USSR. It doesn’t appear that China’s President Xi Jinping is leading China in the same direction and perhaps he has learned from Russia’s mistakes. The USSR broke apart after Mikhail Gorbachev introduced new policies that he hoped would help the USSR “become a more prosperous, productive nation. These policies were called glasnost and perestroika.”
However, these policies were slow to yield positive results and some historians would say they “did more to hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union than to help it.” People living in the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe began to revolt. By 1991 Boris Yeltsin, who believed in some democratic and free market reforms took over and Gorbachev resigned as leader on December 31, 1991 the USSR ceased to exist.
