After Mikhail Gorbachev died in Russia at the end of August, the question of the missed opportunity arose in the socialist neighboring state shortly before the most important political event for years: Would the People's Republic be a freer country today if China were at the top like the Soviet Union once was a reformer would have prevailed?

When the 20th Congress of the Communist Party begins in Beijing next Sunday, the country will appear as if time has turned back to the 1960s.

With Xi Jinping, power is concentrated in the hands of an authoritarian ruler, like Mao once was, who promotes a personality cult, pursues all opponents with a totalitarian surveillance state and tries to extend his reign indefinitely.

Unlike all party leaders since the death of the "Great Helmsman," Xi is standing for a third term.

This means that the consensus principle in China's leadership, which has shaped its rise to the second largest economy in the world, is finally dead.

As always when great power is left unchecked, the results are disastrous.

Firmly at Putin's side

Because Xi underestimated former US President Donald Trump, he has led China into a trade dispute that has cut off the economy from American technology.

Xi's craze for state control has stuttered the private sector as the engine of progress.

Because he does not want to admit that his zero-Covid policy is wrong in view of the unstoppable spread of the virus, Xi has not only sent the economic center of Shanghai, but half the country, into repeated lockdowns.

And since China's president has firmly supported Vladimir Putin despite the Ukraine war, even Germany wants to become less dependent on its largest trading partner.

In view of this record, it is not surprising that rumors of a coup are circulating ahead of the party congress in Beijing.

They reflect less reality than the idea that the head of state could only be an industrial accident in history.

For a long time, the prevailing opinion in the West was that a more liberal China was possible under the rule of the Communist Party.

Because trade was supposed to bring about change, the US pushed for the country's admission to the World Trade Organization, thereby laying the foundation for China's high growth rates.

As the country began to open up more and more to the world, German corporate executives boasted that they had never met a communist in the People's Republic.

The historian Julian Gewirtz, one of the country's most prominent observers and the architect of America's China policy in the White House, is still convinced that their path was not predetermined.

In fact, the country had its own Gorbachev, the researcher writes in a new book.

The man was just unlucky: Zhao Ziyang,

Discussions with Milton Friedman

Like Gorbachev, Zhao had opened up the economy and tried to make government more transparent and efficient.

Above all, Zhao wanted to separate the party and the government, which Xi Jinping has now linked more closely than it has since Mao.

Supported by his patron Deng Xiaoping, China's de facto leader, Zhao brought economists like Milton Friedman to the country and discussed the pros and cons of the market economy with them.

Zhao even had the rule of law in mind.

But in 1989, when he didn't want to bloodily crush the protests on Tiananmen Square, Deng Xiaoping dropped him.

Zhao spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

The question of what could have become of China is raised again today with Xi Jinping, who demands that the party must "run everything" in the country, "government, military, society and science, north, south, west, east and center". .

However, there is much to suggest that Xi is only doing the job the party intends him to do.

Like Deng Xiaoping, today's cadres have understood that freedom is not possible in a dictatorship.

China's opening up has made the country rich.

It is a danger to the party's monopoly on power - and is therefore over for the time being.