In the leadership of the Beijing party, Gorbachev was hated because of the decline of the Soviet empire.
In China, sympathy for the death of Mikhail Gorbachev is extremely muted. Even more: the death of the 91-year-old man is commented on with a good dose of malice and malicious glee.
Hu Xijin, one of the country’s top publicists, describes Gorbachev on his Twitter account as “one of the most controversial leaders in the world”: he has gained wide recognition in the West for “selling the interests of his motherland”. He is also responsible for ensuring that “the wars keep going” on the territory of the former Soviet Union – including Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine.
State journalists on Chinese-language online platforms are even more odious. Commentator Wuwei Li writes to his nearly 900,000 Weibo followers that Gorbachev deserves only “contempt”: “He was a cowardly, incompetent and cowardly politician” who served as a “deterrent example” for China. One could only “thank” him for this teaching. His cynical final word: “Bon Voyage!”