ty of Friendship and Alliance
Mao visits Moscow and get $300 mil low-interest loan and a 30 year military alliance.
Simultaneously, Beijing had begun trying to supplant Moscow as the ideological leader of the world Communist movement. Mao (and supporters) had promoted the idea that Asian and world communist movements should emulate China’s model of peasant revolution, not Russia’s model of urban revolution. US journalist Anna Louise Strong had written the article “The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung” and the book Dawn Out of China, reporting that his intellectual accomplishment was “to change Marxism from a European to an Asiatic form . . . in ways of which neither Marx nor Lenin could dream” — which the Soviet government banned in the USSR.
At the first international Communist conclave in Beijing, Mao advocate Liu Shaoqi praised the “Mao Tse-tung road” as the correct road to communist revolution, warning it was incorrect to follow any other road; moreover, he praised neither Stalin nor the Soviet communist model, as had been the practice among Communists. Yet, with politico-military tensions at crisis in the Korean Peninsula, and fear of US military intervention there, geopolitical circumstances disallowed the USSR and the PRC any ideological split, hence their alliance endured.
- 1950-1953: Korean War
- 1953: Stalin dies and Khrushchev comes to power.
temporary revival of Sino-Soviet friendship
- 1954: Khrushchev visits China and hands over Port Arthur naval base to PRC.
Soviets provide technical aid in 156 industries in China’s first 5 year plan and 520 mil rubles in loans.
Geneva Conference of 1954: PRC and the USSR mutually persuaded the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, to temporarily accept the West’s division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel north.
- 1956: Khrushchev denounced Stalin with The Personality Cult and its Consequences.
- 1958-1961: China’s Great Leap Forward
During the 1950s, Soviet-guided China followed the Soviet model of centralized economic development, emphasizing heavy industry, 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 