 and delegating consumer goods to secondary priority; however, by the late 1950s, Mao had developed different ideas for how China could directly advance to the communist stage of Socialism (per the Marxist denotation), through the mobilization of China’s workers.
Khrushchev’s post-Stalin policies began to irritate Mao, especially that of De-Stalinization and hen he restored relations with Yugoslavia, led by Tito, whom Stalin had denounced in 1947. These occurrences shocked Mao, who had supported Stalin ideologically and politically, because Khrushchev was dismantling Mao’s support of the USSR with public rejections of most of Stalin’s leadership and actions — such as announcing the end of the Cominform, and (most troubling to Mao), de-emphasizing the core Marxist-Leninist thesis of inevitable war between capitalism and socialism.
Khrushchev was advocating the idea of “Peaceful Coexistence”, between communist and capitalist nations — which directly challenged Mao’s “lean-to-one-side” foreign policy, adopted after the Chinese Civil War, when he feared direct Imperial Japanese or US military intervention, the circumstances that pragmatically required a Sino–Soviet alliance. In de-Stalinizing the USSR, Khrushchev was dissolving the condition that had made the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship (1950) attractive to China. Mao thought that the Soviets were retreating ideologically and militarily — from Marxism-Leninism and the global struggle to achieve global communism, and by apparently no longer guaranteeing support to China in a Sino–American war; therefore, the roots of the Sino–Soviet ideological split were established by 1959.
- 1959: Khrushchev meets Eisenhower to decrease Russo-American tensions.
At first, the Sino–Soviet split manifest itself indirectly; polemics between the CPSU and the CPC criticized each others’ pupils — China denounced Tito, Russia denounced Enver Hoxha, leader of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania
- 1960: Romanian Communist Party Congress
They directly criticized each other in the Romanian Communist Party congress, when Khrushchev and Peng Zhen openly quarreled. Premier Khrushchev insulted Chairman Mao Zedong as “a nationalist, an adventurist, and a deviationist”. In turn, Mao insulted Khrushchev as a Marxist revisionist, criticizing him as “patriarchal, arbitrary and tyrannical”. In follow-up, Khrushchev denounced China with an eighty-page letter to the conference.
Khrushchev also withdrew nearly all Soviet technical experts from China, leaving some major projects in an unfinished state. Many blueprints and specifications were also withdrawn.
November 1960, at a congress of 81 Communist parties in Moscow, the Chinese quarreled with the Russians and with most other Communist party delegations — yet compromised to avoid a formal ideological splitting; nonetheless, in October 1961, at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union they again quarreled openly. In December, the USSR severed diplomatic relations with the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, graduating the Russo–Chinese ideological dispute from between political parties to between nation-states.
- 1962: Sino Indian War
USSR does not support China. Maintains moderate relation with India, greatly offending Mao Zedong.
The PRC and the USSR broke relations because of their international actions. Mao criticized Khrushchev for withdrawing from fighting the US in the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). “Khrushchev has moved from adventurism to capitulationism”; Khrushchev replied that Mao’s confrontational policies would provoke a nuclear war.
USSR is alarmed by the Great Leap Forward. USSR has refused to aid Chinese nuclear weapons development and refused to side with them in the Sino Indian War. Mao was offended by all these actions. He perceived Khrushchev as too-conciliatory with the West, despite Soviet prudence in international politics that threatened nuclear warfare (i.e. the US and USSR were nuclear powers by the late 1950s), wherein the USSR managed superpower confrontations such as the status of post-war Berlin.
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