at the USSR has more nuclear attack plans against China than against the US. China built large scale underground shelters.
They did not resort to full-scale war. In October, the PRC and USSR began border-demarcation talks, restoring minimal diplomatic communication.
- 1970: Mao understood that the PRC could not simultaneously confront the USSR and the USA, and suppress internal disorder. During that year, when the Vietnam War was at its worst, and Chinese anti-American rhetoric at its zenith, Mao perceived that China’s geographic neighbors, the Soviets, were the greater threat, and thus Mao sought a pragmatic rapprochement with the US, in confronting the USSR.
- 1971: Henry Kissinger visits China.
- 1972: Nixon visits China.
In the 1970s, Sino-Soviet rivalry extended to Africa and the Middle East, where each Communist power funded and supported political parties, armed movements, and states, vis-à-vis the Ogaden War (1977–78) between Ethiopia and Somalia, the Rhodesian Bush War (1964–79), the Zimbabwean Gukurahundi (1980–87), the Angolan Civil War (1975–2002), the Mozambican Civil War (1977–92), and Palestinian factions.
- 1971: Radical phase of Cultural Revolution comes to an end.
PRC gradually begins to return to Communist political normality. The re-establishment of Chinese domestic tranquility ended direct armed conflict with the USSR but did not improve diplomatic relations.
- 1973: Soviet garrisons on the border are double the size of 1969 garrisons. China continued denouncing “Soviet social imperialism” and accusing the USSR of being enemy to world revolution.
- September 1976: Mao dies.
- 1975: Vietnam War ends, Communist victory.
This left Pro-Soviet regimes in Vietnam and Laos, and a pro-Chinese regime in Cambodia.
- 1978: Pol Pot Khmer Rouge Regime in Democratic Kampuchia [Cambodia]
At first the Vietnamese ignored the Khmer Rouge’s murderous domestic policies in Cambodia, but, when their societal reorganization attacked the ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia, Vietnam deposed Pol Pot in 1978.
- 1975-1979: Cambodian-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 D