mbodian-Vietnamese War – Pol Pot deposed.
PRC denounced the deposition of their Maoist client.
- 1979: Sino-Vietnamese War
PRC invaded northern Vietnam. USSR denounced the PRC’s action.
- December 1979: USSR invades Afghanistan.
The PRC viewed that Soviet action in aid of an ally, as a feint, part of a greater geopolitical encirclement, and so entered a tri-partite alliance with Pakistan and the US to sponsor armed Islamist resistance in Afghanistan to end the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–89).
Deng Xiaoping said three obstacles must be removed so that Sino-Soviet relations might improve:
- The amassed Soviet Army at the PRC-USSR border and in Mongolia
- Soviet support of the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia
- Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
- 1981-1982: Deng Xiaoping distanced the PRC from the US because of its weapons sales to the Nationalist Republic of China in Taiwan island.
- 1982: 12th Chinese Communist Party Congress declared PRC would pursue an independent foreign policy. In Tashkent, USSR (Brezhnev) gave a speech conciliatory towards the PRC. Sino-Soviet relations resumed at the vice-ministerial level.
- 1985: Gorbachev is president of USSR.
He tried to restore relations with the PRC, by:
- reducing the Soviet Army concentrations at the USSR–PRC border and Mongolia
- resuming trade
- dropping the border-demarcation matter.
The matter if the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan remained unresolved and relations remained cool.
In May 1989, President Gorbachev visited the People’s Republic of China, whose government were ambivalent about perestroika and glasnost, his reform programs, which ultimately ended communist government and provoked the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since the PRC did not officially recognize the USSR as a socialist state, it had no official opinion about how he might reform Soviet socialism; yet privately, the Chinese leaders said it was too early for President Gorbachev’s political reform without his first economically reforming the country — whereas Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping effected economic reform, via a mixed economy, without weakening the political power of the Chinese Communist Party.