Sun, May 10, 2026 page7

• What China will learn from Orban’s defeat

  From Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ to Mao’s crackdown, early reform experiments show how dissent can rapidly escalate under one-party rule

  • By Sam Chetwin George
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  Ever since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the country has served as a cautionary tale about the dangers of political reform in one-party states. After Viktor Orban’s defeat in Hungary’s parliamentary elections last month, this lesson is being pondered again by the world’s autocratic powers — not least China.

  The story starts 70 years ago with Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” delivered to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In that speech, Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin, condemning his predecessor’s cult of personality, his brutal purges and his lack of preparedness for the Nazi invasion.

  Supposedly delivered in secret, the speech nevertheless quickly leaked, sending shock waves through the Eastern Bloc countries then under the Kremlin’s thumb. The idea that Stalin, the emblem of absolute power, could come under attack from one of his own acolytes elevated hopes for new political possibilities.

  

  Illustration: Constance Chou

  The effect was particularly dramatic in Hungary. A Budapest debate club called the Petofi Circle — named after the poet who helped inspire the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49 against the Austro-Hungarian Empire — had been founded in 1955 by the Communist Youth League as a controlled outlet for tame discussions about reform. After Khrushchev’s speech, the group’s members began to ask more radical questions.

  In debates that drew thousands of spectators, members criticized Hungary’s Stalinist leader, Matyas Rakosi, and called for press freedom, economic reform and political rehabilitation and restitution for purge victims. This helped ignite widespread opposition to Soviet rule. Within months, student protests had widened into the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a national movement that sought effective independence from the Soviet Union. Khrushchev ultimately sent in troops to crush the uprising.

  Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman Mao Zedong (毛澤東) watched the events in Budapest unfold with growing unease, given the uncomfortable parallels between himself and the version of Stalin that Khrushchev had renounced. Concerned that similar disillusionment might be brewing in China, Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956, creating space for citizens to air grievances and suggest improvements without threatening the CCP’s legitimacy.

  The campaign’s results shocked Mao. Instead of a well-controlled safety valve through which mild criticism and discontent could escape, a deluge of demands for press freedom, calls for the CCP to loosen its grip on economic and cultural life and accusations of entrenched privilege poured out.

  By mid-1957, Mao concluded that the experiment could pose an existential risk to him and to the CCP’s rule. The result was the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which claimed that some of the criticisms were “poisonous weeds” rather than the “fragrant flowers” Mao supposedly welcomed. More than 550,000 intellectuals and professionals were caught in the campaign’s net; most were sent to labor camps and many committed suicide. Their families bore the stigmatizing “rightist” label for years.

  Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalin had led to a revolution in Hungary, and Mao’s experiment with liberalization had produced a legitimacy crisis that the chairman believed could be resolved only through mass repression.

  The lesson Mao drew from these events was that under one-party rule, an opening for dissent can easily ignite rebellion. Autocratic leaders cannot permit intellectual freedom while guaranteeing that it would not undermine the system itself. This hardline view has informed the CCP’s thinking ever since, especially under President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) leadership.

  Against this backdrop, Orban’s defeat is significant for the Chinese leadership. After taking power in 2010, Orban systematically hollowed out the country’s democratic institutions by undermining judicial independence, capturing public media and rewriting electoral rules to entrench his party’s advantages. Taking inspiration from Russian President Vladimir Putin, Orban sought to consolidate power through his model of “illiberal democracy,” which made genuine democratic competition increasingly difficult.

  However, even under an illiberal democracy, remnants of an independent press survived, and a unified opposition party was able to contest elections and mobilize civil society. In the end, this was enough to remove Orban from power.

  For Xi and his underlings, the takeaway is less about Orban’s missteps and more about the binary nature of autocratic power. A regime that permits genuine opposition has conceded something it cannot get back. Once citizens can vote out their rulers, or debate their leaders freely, or organize an independent press, the logic of accountability has been introduced into a system designed to exclude it; once legitimized, it tends to build its own momentum.

  Armed with this understanding, Xi has spent more than a decade consolidating power and purging rivals with extraordinary resolve. Orban’s fall — the latest episode in a historical dialogue between Hungary and China that started in 1956 — would only reinforce Xi’s conviction that no amount of political liberalization is safe.

  Sam Chetwin George is a senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations.
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