This particular era of history has always interested me, and it’s a bit complicated, so I made this timeline to help everyone through it. :)
The Sino–Soviet split was the gradual worsening of relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) during the Cold War (1945–91). Since 1956, the countries had (secretly) been diverging ideologically, and, beginning in 1961, the Chinese Communists formally denounced “The Revisionist Traitor Group of Soviet Leadership.” In the 1960s, this intellectual divergence became critical, continuing until the late 1980s — yet was rendered moot with the USSR’s disestablishment in 1991. Their doctrinal divergence owed as much to Chinese and Russian national, as with the regimes’ interpretative Marxist ideologies.
- 1939-1945: Second Sino-Japanese War
Mao Zedong fought a war of resistance against the Empire of Japan, while fighting the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek at the same time. He ignored most of the political and military advice that Stalin gave him because applying (traditional) Leninist revolutionary theory proved difficult. China, unlike Russia, had no great urban working class, thus he organized the peasants and farmers to fight the Chinese Revolution.
- 1939-1945: WWII
Stalin urged Mao to form a coalition with Chiang against Imperial Japan. After the war, Stalin told Mao not to cease power, but to negotiate with Chiang because Stalin had signed a Treaty of Friendship and Alliance with the Nationalists in 1945.
Chiang insisted Stalin act on the USSR’s illegal occupation of Tannu Uriankhai in Northern Mongolia. Stalin broke the treaty requiring Soviet withdrawal from Manchuria three months after Japan’s surrender and gave Manchuria to Mao. Stalin also gave Mao’s party $1 bil in material aid to help expel the Nationalists from continental China and establish the PRC.
- 1947: Stalin denounced Yugoslavia, led by Tito.
- October 1, 1949: Communist China is born under the leadership of Mao Zedong.
- 1950: Sino-Soviet Treaty 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,