The Sino-Soviet split was the gradual worsening of relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) during the Cold War. This was primarily caused by divergences that arose from their different interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism, as influenced by their respective geopolitics during the Cold War of 1947–1991. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sino-Soviet debates about the interpretation of orthodox Marxism became specific disputes about the Soviet Union's policies of national de-Stalinization and international peaceful coexistence with the Western Bloc, which Chinese leader Mao Zedong decried as revisionism. Against that ideological background, China took a belligerent stance towards the Western world, and publicly rejected the Soviet Union's policy of peaceful coexistence between the Western Bloc and Eastern Bloc. In addition, China resented the Soviet Union's growing ties with India due to factors such as the Sino-Indian border dispute, while the Soviet Union feared that Mao was unconcerned about the drastic consequences of nuclear warfare.John W. Garver, China's Quest: The History of the Foreign Relations of the People's Republic (2016) pp 113–45.
In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin and Stalinism in the speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" and began the de-Stalinization of the USSR. Mao and the Chinese leadership were appalled as the PRC and the USSR progressively diverged in their interpretations and applications of Leninist theory. By 1961, their intractable ideological differences provoked the PRC's formal denunciation of Soviet communism as the work of "revisionist traitors" in the USSR. The PRC also declared the Soviet Union social imperialist. The Soviet Union, in turn, criticized Mao Zedong and China's practices during the subsequent Cultural Revolution. For Eastern Bloc countries, the Sino-Soviet split was a question of who would lead the revolution for world communism, and to whom (China or the USSR) the vanguard parties of the world would turn for political advice, financial aid, and military assistance.Robert A. Scalapino, "Sino-Soviet Competition in Africa", Foreign Affairs (1964) 42#4, pp. 640–654. ; . In that vein, both countries competed for the leadership of world communism through the revolutionary parties native to the countries in their spheres of influence. The conflict culminated after the Zhenbao Island border incident in 1969, after which the Soviet Union reportedly considered the possibility of launching a large-scale nuclear strike against China, and the Chinese leadership, including Mao, was evacuated from Beijing, before both sides eventually returned to diplomatic negotiations.
In the Western world, the Sino-Soviet split transformed the bi-polar cold war into a tri-polar cold war. The rivalry facilitated Mao's realization of Sino-American rapprochement with the US president Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. In the West, the policies of triangular diplomacy and linkage emerged. Like the Tito–Stalin split, the occurrence of the Sino-Soviet split also weakened the concept of monolithic communism, the Western perception that the communist nations were ideologically, and therefore politically, united.Rothbard, Murray N. "The Myth of Monolithic Communism", Libertarian Review, Vol. 8., No. 1 (February 1979), p. 32. However, the USSR and China both continued to cooperate with North Vietnam during the Vietnam War into the 1970s, despite rivalry elsewhere. Historically, the Sino-Soviet split facilitated the Marxist–Leninist Realpolitik with which Mao established the tri-polar geopolitics (PRC–USA–USSR) of the late-period Cold War (1956–1991) to create an anti-Soviet front, which Maoists connected to the Three Worlds Theory. According to Lüthi, there is "no documentary evidence that the Chinese or the Soviets thought about their relationship within a triangular framework during the period."
Origins Reluctant co-belligerents
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the nationalist Kuomintang party (KMT) set aside their civil war to expel the Empire of Japan from the Republic of China. To that end, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, ordered Mao Zedong, leader of the CCP, to co-operate with Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the KMT, in fighting the Japanese. Following the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, both parties resumed their civil war, which the communists won by 1949.
At World War II's conclusion, Stalin advised Mao not to seize political power at that time, and, instead, to collaborate with Chiang due to the 1945 USSR–KMT Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. Mao obeyed Stalin in communist solidarity. Three months after the Japanese surrender, in November 1945, when Chiang opposed the annexation of Tannu Uriankhai (Mongolia) to the USSR, Stalin broke the treaty requiring the Red Army's withdrawal from Manchuria (giving Mao regional control) and ordered Soviet commander Rodion Malinovsky to give the Chinese communists the Japanese leftover weapons.
In the five-year post-World War II period, the United States partly financed Chiang, his nationalist political party, and the National Revolutionary Army. However, Washington put heavy pressure on Chiang to form a joint government with the communists. US envoy George Marshall spent 13 months in China trying without success to broker peace.Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945–1947 (2018). In the concluding three-year period of the Chinese Civil War, the CCP defeated and expelled the KMT from mainland China. Consequently, the KMT retreated to Taiwan in December 1949.
Chinese communist revolution As a revolutionary theoretician of communism seeking to realize a socialist state in China, Mao developed and adapted the urban ideology of Orthodox Marxism for practical application to the agrarian conditions of pre-industrial China and the Chinese people.Lüthi, Lorenz M. Historical Background, 1921–1955, The Sino-Soviet split: Cold War in the Communist World (2008) p. 26. Mao's Sinification of Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, established political pragmatism as the first priority for realizing the accelerated modernization of a country and a people, and ideological orthodoxy as the secondary priority because Orthodox Marxism originated for practical application to the socio-economic conditions of industrialized Western Europe in the 19th century.The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, Third Edition (1999) Allan Bullock and Stephen Trombley, Eds., p. 501.
During the Chinese Civil War in 1947, Mao dispatched American journalist Anna Louise Strong to the West, bearing political documents explaining China's socialist future, and asked that she "show them to Party leaders in the United States and Europe", for their better understanding of the Chinese Communist Revolution, but that it was not "necessary to take them to Moscow."
Mao trusted Strong because of her positive reportage about him, as a theoretician of communism, in the article "The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung", and about the CCP's communist revolution, in the 1948 book Dawn Comes Up Like Thunder Out of China: An Intimate Account of the Liberated Areas in China, which reports that Mao's intellectual achievement was "to change Marxism from a European [form] to an Asiatic form . . . in ways of which neither Marx nor Lenin could dream."
Treaty of Sino-Soviet friendship
In 1950, Mao and Stalin safeguarded the national interests of China and the Soviet Union with the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. The treaty improved the two countries' geopolitical relationship on political, military and economic levels.Lüthi, Lorenz M. The Sino-Soviet split: Cold War in the Communist World (2008) pp. 31–32. Stalin's largesse to Mao included a loan for $300 million; military aid, should Japan attack the PRC; and the transfer of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, Port Arthur and Dalian to Chinese control. In return, the PRC recognized the independence of the Mongolian People's Republic.
Despite the favourable terms, the treaty of socialist friendship included the PRC in the geopolitical hegemony of the USSR, but unlike the governments of the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, the USSR did not control Mao's government. In six years, the great differences between the Soviet and the Chinese interpretations and applications of Marxism–Leninism voided the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship.Crozier, Brian The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (1999) pp. 142–157.Peskov, Yuri. "Sixty Years of the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance Between the U.S.S.R. and the PRC, 14 February 1950" Far Eastern Affairs (2010) 38#1 pp. 100–115.
In 1954, Soviet first secretary Nikita Khrushchev repaired relations between the USSR and the PRC with trade agreements, a formal acknowledgement of Stalin's economic unfairness to the PRC, fifteen industrial-development projects, and exchanges of technicians (c. 10,000) and political advisors (c. 1,500), whilst Chinese labourers were sent to fill shortages of manual workers in Siberia. Despite this, Mao and Khrushchev disliked each other, both personally and ideologically. However, by 1955, consequent to Khrushchev's having repaired Soviet relations with Mao and the Chinese, 60% of the PRC's exports went to the USSR, by way of the five-year plans of China begun in 1953.
Discontents of de-Stalinization
In early 1956, Sino-Soviet relations began deteriorating, following Khrushchev's de-Stalinization of the USSR, which he initiated with the speech On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences that criticized Stalin and Stalinism – especially the Great Purge of Soviet society, of the rank-and-file of the Soviet Armed Forces, and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In light of de-Stalinization, the CPSU's changed ideological orientation – from Stalin's confrontation of the West to Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence with it – posed problems of ideological credibility and political authority for Mao, who had emulated Stalin's style of leadership and practical application of Marxism–Leninism in the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the PRC as a country.
At a meeting with the Soviet Ambassador in late March 1956, Mao spoke of a great deal about Stalin's errors towards China, but very little about the cult of personality, and emphasized instead that Stalin had been "a great Marxist, a good and honest revolutionary" who had made mistakes "not on everything, but [only] on certain issues". These views were soon reflected in the People's Daily editorial entitled "On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" which outlined that it was a "grave misconception...that some people consider Stalin was wrong in everything". It further added that under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Union had made "glorious achievements" in which he had "an ineffaceable share" while his "mistakes" had been confined to the latter part of his life. Mao's concern was that Khrushchev was "throwing out the communist baby along with the Stalinist bathwater".