I often see people speak of the USSR taking a "Chinese path" to reform when discussing late Soviet WIs. What is almost never spoken of is what this would happen if the Soviets adopted any Chinese ideology in the process of reforming their economy to be more like modern Chinese state capitalism.
So WI the Soviets start to give real respect to some or all of the thinkers who contributed to the Chinese strand of Communist thought during an alternate 1980s (so no Gorbachev, rather the USSR gets a reformist General Secretary who is a Communist true believer)? What implications would it have culturally and politically?
My reading of events in OTL is that the Soviets were more open to Western (Capitalist) thinking than they were to Eastern (fellow Communist) thinking. Indeed, I wonder if adopting sections of Mao's or Deng Xiaoping's writings, or even adopting ideas from the Communist thinkers in their Western neighbours in Yugoslavia, Hungary or Poland, would be more of a threat to the intellectual justifications for Soviet rule than adopting American ideas was. The Soviets seem to have felt threatened by the idea of Russian thinkers not being the leading theoreticians behind world Communism. As such, I could see this causing a real storm in a teacup. But on the other hand, would ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union care if the General Secretary quoted Tito or Deng Xiaoping during a Party powwow?
fasquardon