Sino-Soviet split

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Sino-Soviet split
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese 中蘇交惡
Simplified Chinese 中苏交恶
Russian name
Russian Советско–китайский раскол
Romanization Sovetsko–kitayskiy raskol














During the 1950s, Soviet-guided China followed the Soviet model of centralized economic development, emphasising heavy industry, and delegating consumer goods to secondary priority; however, by the late 1950s, Mao had developed ideas for direct advances through the mobilization of China's workers. These ideas became the basis for the Great Leap Forward (1958–61).

After Stalin[edit]

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev made an effort to further the burgeoning relations with China that Stalin had begun, traveling to the country in 1954 and making various deals with Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership that expanded the economic and political alliances between the two countries. Khrushchev also took a step further with improving relations by acknowledging Stalin’s unfair trade deals, as well as revealing a list of active KGB agents in China that had been placed there during Stalin’s reign.[6] Khrushchev was able to reach many different prominent economic agreements during his visit, including an additional loan for economic development from the USSR to the PRC, an agreement that planned for an additional fifteen USSR-funded industrial projects within China, as well as a trade of human capital.[7] This trade consisted of the USSR sending thousands of economic specialists (the total almost reached 10,000 before their withdrawal in 1960) as well as almost 1500 political advisors to assist the Chinese, while the PRC provided some of their own economic specialists and unskilled laborers to make up for shortages of labor in Siberia. However, the meeting between the two leaders was not completely positive – Mao found Khrushchev’s personality grating, and Khrushchev was unimpressed with Chinese culture.[8]

The furthering of the political and economic alliance were not the only ways the USSR and PRC improved their relationship; they also began to collaborate more extensively in international relations, most notably with their efforts to encourage a peace treaty between North and South Vietnam in 1954. In 1955, relations only continued to improve. By this year, economic trade collaboration had begun to develop to the point that 60% of Chinese exports were to the USSR. Mao also began to implement the Chinese “Five Year Plan”, modeled after the USSR’s own successful Five Year Plans that had begun a couple of decades previously, by the end of 1955.[9] Mao also promoted and encouraged the collectivization of agriculture in the PRC, applauding Stalin’s own policies towards agriculture and industrialization.

This period, from roughly Stalin’s death in 1953 to Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956 (which marked the beginning of his de-Stalinization policies) has been called the “golden age” of Sino-Soviet relations. This is mainly through the increased economic and political cooperation as well as collaboration in international politics between the two countries.[10] However, relations began to deteriorate in 1956 after Khrushchev revealed his “Secret Speech” at the 20th Communist Party Congress. The “Secret Speech” criticized many of Stalin’s policies, especially his purges of Party members, and marked the beginning of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization process. This created a serious domestic problem for Mao, who had supported many of Stalin’s policies and modeled many of his own after them.[11] With Khrushchev’s denouncement of Stalin, many people questioned Mao’s own policies in China. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and conflict in Poland – a direct result of Khrushchev’s statements – also worried Mao. He and other members of the Chinese leadership began drafting a public statement that criticized Khrushchev’s new policy and reaffirmed Stalinism (which Mao wanted to continue to commit to and implement), while still trying to maintain positive relations with the USSR.[12] This event showed the beginnings of the ideological split between the PRC and the USSR. Mao was also worried about the “peaceful coexistence” foreign policy with the West that Khrushchev began, although this did not become a big concern for the PRC until 1957.[13]

The Hungarian Revolution had made Mao worried that similar conflicts could potentially rise in the PRC, and he briefly turned to political liberalization in the form of lessened political censorship in 1957. This policy was known as the “Hundred Flowers Campaign”, but was unsuccessful and backfired against Mao, weakening his position within his own party.[14] This only convinced him further that de-Stalinization was a mistake and not ideologically preferable to Stalinist-style Communism. This led Mao to take a sharp turn to the left ideologically, which contrasted with the ideological softening of de-Stalinization. With the failure of Khrushchev’s allies to oust him later that year and the strengthening of his position as Soviet leader, the two countries were set on two different ideological paths. By the November Moscow Meeting of socialist countries in 1957, relations between Mao and Khrushchev were quickly souring.[15] Khrushchev attempted to maintain more positive relations with an offer of assistance in development of nuclear weapons in China, but tensions remained high. China was growing more concerned with Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence” policy with the West, especially after their failed talks with the United States. These talks as well as the United State’s positioning of nuclear weapons in Taiwan only increased their conviction that an aggressive foreign policy was needed to confront the US.[16] While the PRC had mainly been preoccupied with the issue of de-Stalinization in 1956 and 1957, their concern with the Soviets “peaceful coexistence” policy came to a head in 1958.

Despite a few agreements in early 1958, divergences between USSR and PRC policies only increased. One notable divergence was Mao’s implementation of his “Great Leap Forward” plan, which utilized communist policies closer to Stalin than to Khrushchev, including forming a personality cult around Mao as well as more revolutionary Stalinist economic policies.[17] Mao also angered the USSR by criticizing Khrushchev’s economic policies through the plan while also calling for more Soviet aid. The Soviet leader was not happy with the radicalization of China’s domestic politics and saw them as evidence of an increasingly confrontational and unpredictable China, and this was reflected with increased stinginess towards further military and economic agreements with China later on in 1958.[18] Khrushchev visited Beijing in late July in order to attempt to work out a military deal to allow Soviet submarines in the Pacific, but instead an angry Mao accused him of trying to take over the Chinese coastline in the Pacific. Khrushchev ended up departing Beijing in early August with no agreement.[19] By the end of August, an incensed Mao had decided to force the issue of Taiwan by attacking the city of Ginmen and beginning the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. While Mao had decided to start the conflict on August twenty-third in advance, he had decided to keep the information from Khrushchev. The crisis forced the Soviets to take a step back from their coexistence policy with the United States and declare their support for China. Khrushchev, however, was very surprised by the Chinese attack and was not happy about the Chinese not informing him of their plans, especially considering he had been in China less than a month preceding the crisis. The US had also threatened nuclear war over the conflict, which made Khrushchev very uneasy and angry over how easily the Chinese had forced the USSR to get involved.[20] He was very skeptical of Mao’s behavior, viewing his actions as irrational and even questioning his mental stability.[21] Khrushchev began to rescind different deals made earlier, such as the delivery of a Soviet atomic bomb to China. This lack of communication on the part of the Chinese, as well as disagreement between the two ideologically concerning China’s Great Leap Forward, significantly damaged Soviet-Sino relations during 1958. Both felt that the other could no longer be trusted, a sentiment that only increased during 1959.


1958–59 are often considered the key years in convincing Mao that the USSR was not to be trusted.[22] In 1959, Premier Khrushchev met with US President Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61) to decrease tensions with the Western world. The USSR was astonished by the Great Leap Forward,[citation needed] had renounced aid to Chinese nuclear weapons development, and refused to side with them in the Sino-Indian War (1962), by maintaining a moderate relation with India—actions offensive to Mao. Thereafter, he perceived Khrushchev as too tolerant of the West, despite the sometimes confrontational Soviet stance toward Western powers. The Chinese Communist Party believed that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was focusing too heavily on "Soviet-U.S. cooperation for the domination of the world," with actions counter to Marxism–Leninism.[23]

Mao expected Khrushchev's reaction to the American U-2 spy plane incident to be much more aggressive. Khrushchev demanded an official apology at the 1960 Paris Summit from Eisenhower, who refused. Mao and the CCP took Eisenhower's brash response as an affront to all socialist countries, and the PRC responded in kind. Mass rallies were held to demand that Khrushchev take action against the American aggressors. When Khrushchev did not respond with military force, his image in China as a Communist leader was wounded. Mao and Khrushchev then argued at the Bucharest Conference of the World Communist and Workers’ Parties, heatedly attacking each other's ideologies. Mao argued that Khrushchev's emphasis on material development would make the people soft and un-revolutionary, while Khrushchev said, "If we could promise the people nothing except revolution, they would scratch their heads and say 'Isn't it better to have good goulash?'"[24]

At first, the Sino-Soviet split manifested indirectly, as criticism towards each other's client states. China denounced Yugoslavia and Tito, who had pursued a non aligned foreign policy, while the USSR denounced Enver Hoxha and the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, which had refused to abandon its pro-Stalin stance and sought its survival in alignment with China, at the peak of Khruschev's De-Stalinization agenda. Bao Sansan described the Party's message to the cadres in China, "When Khrushchev stopped Russian aid to Albania, Hoxha said to his people: 'Even if we have to eat the roots of grass to live, we won't take anything from Russia.' China is not guilty of chauvinism and immediately sent food to our brother country."[25] The USSR also offered moral support to the Tibetan rebels in their 1959 Tibetan uprising against Red China.

By 1960, their mutual criticism moved out in the open, when Khrushchev and Peng Zhen had an open argument at the Romanian Communist Party congress. Premier Khrushchev insulted Chairman Mao Zedong as "a nationalist, an adventurist, and a deviationist". In turn, Mao called Khrushchev a Marxist revisionist, criticizing him as "patriarchal, arbitrary and tyrannical". Khrushchev then denounced China with an eighty-page letter to the conference.

Khrushchev materially responded to Mao by withdrawing around 1,400 Soviet experts and technicians from China, leading to the cancellation of more than 200 scientific projects intended to foster cooperation between the two nations. To Mao, the Soviet withdrawal of personnel from China justified his accusation that Khrushchev had caused not only the PRC's massive economic failures, but also the famines over the course of the Great Leap Forward. In truth, the Soviet withdrawal did little to aid or hurt the agricultural crisis; only a few Soviet experts were working on alleviating China’s famine. Diplomatically, though, the damage had been done.

The PRC and the USSR both still had reason to prefer unity. Mao needed to continue economic relations, to help with China's famine and its border problems with India; for his part, Khrushchev had lost significant ground in his policy of détente with the U.S. His accusations of espionage against Eisenhower and the breakdown of diplomacy at the Paris Summit had exacerbated tensions between the two superpowers and the PRC remained the USSR’s closest military asset and ally.[26]

In November 1960, at a congress of 81 Communist parties in Moscow, the Chinese argued with the Soviets and with most other delegations, but still compromised, wanting to avoid a formal ideological split. In October 1961, however, at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union they again had an open confrontation.[27] In December, the USSR cut diplomatic relations with China-backed Albania, escalating the dispute from the level of political parties to that of nations.

In 1962, the PRC and the USSR finally broke relations. Chairman Mao criticized Premier Khrushchev for withdrawing in the Cuban missile crisis (1962), stating that "Khrushchev has moved from adventurism to capitulationism". Khrushchev replied angrily that Mao's confrontational policies would lead to a nuclear war. At the same time, the USSR was siding with India against China in the Sino-Indian War (1962).[28]

When India forcibly occupied the Portuguese enclave of Goa in 1961, Moscow lauded the action while an unimpressed Beijing declared that "India's apparent contribution to anti-imperialist struggle consists of taking on the world's smallest imperialist power."

In the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear disarmament was brought to the forefront of geopolitics. To curb the production of nuclear weapons in other nations, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the U.S. signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty on August 5, 1963. At the time, China was developing its own nuclear weaponry, and Mao saw the treaty as an attempt to slow China's advancement as a superpower. He was angered that Khrushchev had once again failed to deal aggressively with the U.S. This was the final straw for Mao, and from September 1963 to July 1964, he published nine letters openly criticizing every aspect of Khrushchev’s leadership.

The Sino-Soviet alliance had now completely collapsed, and Mao turned to other Asian, African, and Latin American countries to develop new and stronger alliances and to further the PRC’s economic and ideological redevelopment.[29]

Formal ideological statements[edit]

Each régime followed their actions with formal ideological statements. In June 1963, the PRC published The Chinese Communist Party's Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement,[30] and the USSR replied with its Open Letter of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union;[31] these were the last formal communications between them. By 1964, Chairman Mao asserted that a counter-revolution in the USSR had re-established capitalism there; The Soviets broke relations with China, and the Warsaw Pact countries followed.

After Leonid Brezhnev deposed Premier Khrushchev in October 1964, Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai travelled to Moscow, to speak with the new leaders of the USSR, Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin. He returned disappointed to China, reporting to Mao that the Soviets remained firm. Chairman Mao denounced "Khrushchevism without Khrushchev," continuing Sino-Soviet hostility.

China accused the Soviet Union of colluding with the United States. During the Glassboro Summit Conference of June 1967, between Kosygin and American president Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, Radio Peking claimed that the two men discussed "a great conspiracy on a worldwide basis ... criminally selling the rights of the revolution of Vietnam people, Arabs, as well as Asian, African, and Latin-American peoples to U.S. imperialists."[32] This was a significant change in power dynamics, with subtle, lasting effects on American-Soviet relations.


Cultural Revolution[edit]

Main article: Cultural Revolution

Meanwhile, in China, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to prevent the development of Russian-style bureaucratic communism of the USSR. The schools and universities were closed as students, following Mao's proclamations, organized themselves into Red Guard, grassroots-led units of radicals. However, this process was chaotic and violent and had no real leadership, and so over time the Red Guard divided into factions, and their subsequent violence provoked civil war in some parts of China; Mao had the Army suppress the Red Guard factions; and when factionalism occurred in the Army, Mao dispersed the Red Guard, and then began to rebuild the Chinese Communist Party.[33]


National interests conflict[edit]



Border war[edit]




The John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations had considered attempting to destroy the Chinese program before it succeeded, but the USSR had refused to cooperate.[36] Now the U.S. warned the USSR that a nuclear attack against China would precipitate a world-wide war, and the USSR relented.[37] Aware of that possibility, China built large-scale underground shelters, such as Beijing's Underground City, and military shelters such as the Underground Project 131 command center, in Hubei, and the "816 Project" nuclear research center in Fuling, Chongqing.

Geopolitical pragmatism[edit]





In the Stalinist tradition, the pre–1860 Chinese presence in lands Tsarist Russia acquired with the Treaty of Aigun and the Convention of Peking became a politically incorrect subject in the Soviet press; "inconvenient" museum exhibits were removed from public view,[38] and the Jurchen-script text about the Jin Dynasty stele, supported by a stone tortoise in the Khabarovsk Museum, was covered with cement.[40]

International Communist rivalry[edit]




The transition[edit]



Transcending Mao[edit]



Competing hegemonies[edit]




  3. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.





China and Afghanistan had neutral relations with each other during the King's rule. When the pro Soviet Afghan communists seized power in Afghanistan in 1978, relations between China and the Afghan communists quickly turned hostile. The Afghan pro-Soviet communists supported China's enemies in Vietnam and blamed China for supporting Afghan anti communist militants. China responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by supporting the Afghan Mujahidin by providing small arms,vehicles and other aid through third parties such as the Pakistani military and intelligence and the CIA, and ramping up their military presence near Afghanistan in Xinjiang. China acquired military equipment from America to defend itself from Soviet attack.[43]





See also[edit]


  5. ^ "1948：柏林危机是否影响中国". Retrieved 24 February 2016. 
  6. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Historical Background, 1921-1955". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 40–41. ISBN 0691135908. 
  7. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Historical Background, 1921-1955". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 40. ISBN 0691135908. 
  9. ^ Shabad, Theodore (December 1955). "Communist China's 5 Year Plan". Far Eastern Survey 12 (24): 189. 
  11. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Collapse of Socialist Unity". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 49–50. ISBN 0691135908. 
  12. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Collapse of Socialist Unity". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 62–63. ISBN 0691135908. 
  14. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Collapse of Socialist Unity". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 71–73. ISBN 0691135908. 
  15. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Collapse of Socialist Unity". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 76–77. ISBN 0691135908. 
  16. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Mao's Challenges". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 80. ISBN 0691135908. 
  17. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Mao's Challenges". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 81–83. ISBN 0691135908. 
  18. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Mao's Challenges". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 103–104. ISBN 0691135908. 
  19. ^ Luthi, Lorenz (2008). "Mao's Challenges". The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 93–94. ISBN 0691135908. 
  21. ^ M., Sheng (2008). "Mao and China's Relations with the Superpowers in the 1950s: A New Look at the Taiwan Strait Crises and the Sino-Soviet Split". Modern China 4 (34): 499. doi:10.1177/0097700408315991. 
  22. ^ David Wolff (7 July 2011). ""One Finger's Worth of Historical Events": New Russian and Chinese Evidence on the Sino-Soviet Alliance and Split, 1948-1959". Wilson Center. Retrieved 24 February 2016. 
  23. ^ "Chinese Communist Party: The Leaders of the CPSU are the Greatest Splitters of Our Times, February 4, 1964". Modern History Sourcebook. Fordham University. Retrieved 1 July 2015. 
  24. ^ Mark, "Ideological radicalization," 49.
  26. ^ Mark, "Ideological radicalization," 49-50.
  27. ^ One-Third of the Earth, Time, 27 October 1961
  28. ^ Richard R. Wertz. "Exploring Chinese History: Politics: International Relations: Sino- Soviet Relations". Retrieved 15 April 2016. 
  29. ^ Mark, "Ideological radicalization," 53–55.
  30. ^ "A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the InternationalCommunist Movement". Retrieved 24 February 2016. 
  31. ^ Archived December 25, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
  36. ^ Burr, W.; Richelson, J. T. (2000–2001). "Whether to "Strangle the Baby in the Cradle": The United States and the Chinese Nuclear Program, 1960-64". International Security 25 (3): 54–99. doi:10.2307/2626706 (inactive 2015-01-09). JSTOR 2626706. 

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