Sino-Soviet split?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I've heard of the split and knew that it had to do with differences in governing but that's all I know.

Extensive education is required.

Thanks.

[MarxSchmarx]

It's complicated

A key trigger was Khrushchev's speech denouncing what he and many other saw as the despotic excesses of the Stalinist era. Mao and other chinese communists found this a mistaken analysis and was quite concerned that it would threaten his plans for China's rapid development.

There's of course much much more to it, but basically it was a disagreement between Beijing and Moscow over deStalinization.

[Marxach-Léinínach]

Khrushchev seized power, started implementing revisionist policies, China and Albania pointed this out, Khrushchev didn't take kindly to that, and it all escalated from there

[ComradeOm]

There's of course much much more to it, but basically it was a disagreement between Beijing and Moscow over deStalinization.I think that's overstating the role of ideology. It can't be discounted entirely of course, but if Stalin does come into the discussion then it should be in the context of Khrushchev's reforms possibly undermining the CCP domestically, and Mao feeling miffed that he did not become 'Communist No 1' on Uncle Joe's death

No, the root of the Split lay in good 'ol competing national interests. This was essentially, without resorting too much to parallelism, a resumption of the wariness that had marked Chinese/Russian relations prior to the late 19th C and the decay of the Chinese Empire. Except now complicated with a whole range of border issues introduced by Tsarist advances along the Amur. Hooray! So with the re-emergence of China as an independent power around the 1950s, the simple reality is that a thin veneer of common ideology was not enough to unite two nationstates that were largely concerned with their own self-interests

[Die Neue Zeit]

Mao feeling miffed that he did not become 'Communist No 1' on Uncle Joe's death

So why didn't he move to Moscow?

[chegitz guevara]

The split occurred over China's demanding the bomb from the USSR, and the USSR's refusal to give them any. Things went down hill rapidly from there.

[Kléber]

Mao initially went along with Khrushchev and launched a Chinese version of the "thaw," the Hundred Flowers Campaign. The bickering and ideological denunciations started when the Soviets rejected the Great Leap Forward, which was partly an attempt by the CPC bureaucracy to jump ahead of the USSR.

[blake 3:17]

I just read Margaret MacMillan's Nixon in China, which I was brilliant. MacMillan is definitely not a Marxist or a leftist, but a very good historian.

There's some really interesting stuff she includes in the book on the relationship between China and the USSR. The split is pretty convoluted and much less ideological than part of the big political game.

When you get into this stuff, it's like watching a thousand different chess games.

Edited to add: I'm with Comrade Om on this one. I don't know about the nuclear question.

[Marxach-Léinínach]

Mao didn't quite "go along" with Khrushchev at first, even as early as 1957 Mao was saying that Khrushchev was wrong about Stalin. I'd say a more accurate analysis would be that out of fear of being "sectarian" he wrongly hesitated to all-out oppose Khrushchev's revisionism at first, but thankfully corrected this after Enver Hoxha openly condemned Khrushchev in 1960.

[MarxSchmarx]

There's of course much much more to it, but basically it was a disagreement between Beijing and Moscow over deStalinization. I think that's overstating the role of ideology. It can't be discounted entirely of course, but if Stalin does come into the discussion then it should be in the context of Khrushchev's reforms possibly undermining the CCP domestically, and Mao feeling miffed that he did not become 'Communist No 1' on Uncle Joe's death

No, the root of the Split lay in good 'ol competing national interests. This was essentially, without resorting too much to parallelism, a resumption of the wariness that had marked Chinese/Russian relations prior to the late 19th C and the decay of the Chinese Empire. Except now complicated with a whole range of border issues introduced by Tsarist advances along the Amur. Hooray! So with the re-emergence of China as an independent power around the 1950s, the simple reality is that a thin veneer of common ideology was not enough to unite two nationstates that were largely concerned with their own self-interests

Certainly I think that long history of mutual mistrust between Beijing and St. Petersburg later Moscow going well into WWII and their awkward defacto alliance against the Japanese and a lesser extent the Brits enabled a lot of the heated rhetoric and escalated the situation.

However, the problem was that Mao, and a handful of the CHinese politburo, enjoyed very close relations with Stalin that helped them overcome a lot of these historical misgivings. There was for example a widespread penetration of Russian engineers, scientists, and advisors into even remote areas of China to help develop the Chinese socialist economy, and likewise anybody who was anybody in the Chinese bureaucracy and technological elite went to Russia to learn the latest. The two countries moreover shared a common enemy that they felt threatened their territorial integrity. As such, there was a lot of "thawing" if you will over the historical misgivings.

The question of the Sino-Soviet split, therefore, is why did the "real" factors, which had been latent as you note since Qing-Tsarist times, suddenly revert to the forefront?

I don't think it was ideology so much as the fact that the CCP was highly dependent on Mao and a few other leaders, who saw in deStalinization a real threat to their legitimacy within the new China and their plans. They weren't therefore so much concerned about territorial grievences as they were about the fact that something analogous to Khruschev's demands for deStalinization will occur in China and take down the Atalinist inspired leadership with it.

I supposese one could reasonably argue that the "split" would not have been so prononouced if it weren't for isssues like the amur delta or Mongolia or the historical misgivings and the realpolitik of the potential for a Sino-American alliance. And I give the explanations of the sort you give quite a bit of credence, but I still don't think it would have happened and been so pronounced if it weren't from Khruschev's denunciation of stalinism, if for no other reason than that Mao and the Politburo felt so invested in Stalinist policies.

[ComradeOm]

The question of the Sino-Soviet split, therefore, is why did the "real" factors, which had been latent as you note since Qing-Tsarist times, suddenly revert to the forefront?The obvious answer being that the 1950s was the first time since the 19th C that there was a real 'China' in the dynamic. Let's remember that the Chinese Civil War had only ended three years prior to Stalin's death, thus creating the first unitary Chinese state since the empire had started to unravel almost a century previously. Russia had been in a position of unquestioned dominance in the Far East since 1911 and it's likely that only WWI and subsequent turmoil at home prevented further Tsarist gains in the region. The 1950s was the first time that the later generation of Soviet politicians were confronted with a real and assertive Chinese government

Under these conditions its perfectly understandable that Khrushchev would have little to no interest in further strengthening what was a potentially dangerous geopolitical rival

Now this is not to say that the personalities or ideology involved played no role. I largely agree with you on the idea that deStalinisation was a threat to Mao. I'd put a slightly different spin on this though by suggesting that the need for a distinctly Chinese, and non-Soviet, ideological programme was also driven by China's re-emergence on the world stage and the need to legitimise not just its existing leadership but also its new foreign and domestic policies

[Kléber]

Mao didn't quite "go along" with Khrushchev at first, even as early as 1957 Mao was saying that Khrushchev was wrong about Stalin.
That's a year after the start of the thaw, when Mao decided to end the HFC, and even then he only made a timid attack on de-Stalinization. If you love Mao for that then maybe you should get into Brezhnev, since he was the architect of "re-Stalinization." Oh and let's not forget that Mao had Stalin's man, the "Chinese Beria" Gao Gang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gao_Gang), executed shortly after his master croaked in 1953.

A more significant development in 1957 is that Mao began to talk about "permanent revolution" and a "bureaucratic capitalist class" as an excuse for breaking with USSR, which got him accused of Trotskyism.


I'd say a more accurate analysis would be that out of fear of being "sectarian" he wrongly hesitated to all-out oppose Khrushchev's revisionism at first, but thankfully corrected this after Enver Hoxha openly condemned Khrushchev in 1960.Your analysis is not materialist. History is the history of class struggles, not cloistered politicians spewing out misleading propaganda. How Mao and Hoxha described the Soviet leaders in their love letters to one another is next to irrelevant. The Sino-Soviet split erupted in 1959 when the PRC broke off economic relations with the USSR and paid off its debts after Soviet refusal to help with the Great Leap Forward. The disagreement arose from competition between the Soviet and Chinese bureaucracies, with the opportunist Albanian bureaucracy latching on to the side that allowed it to become more important (as it had done in the Tito-Stalin split).


However, the problem was that Mao, and a handful of the CHinese politburo, enjoyed very close relations with Stalin that helped them overcome a lot of these historical misgivings. ... The question of the Sino-Soviet split, therefore, is why did the "real" factors, which had been latent as you note since Qing-Tsarist times, suddenly revert to the forefront?
It was not because Stalin was friends with Mao and Khrushchev wasn't. In fact, personal relations between Stalin and Mao were icy and Stalin's best friends in the CPC were purged in the Gao-Rao affair after the death of their "parent." It would be an error to take Mao's writings at face value and believe the split occurred because of his horror at de-Stalinization. If Mao were really a dogmatic anti-revisionist who learnt at Hoxha's feet as some people in this thread claim, he would not have launched a Chinese version of de-Stalinization in 1956. Peripheral strips of permafrost in Siberia were not the cause of the split either.

The underlying causes for the split which existed before 1959 were material contradictions between the interests of the Chinese bureaucracy and those of the Soviet bureaucracy. The CPC leaders were afraid that the "Soviet elder brother" would continue to outpace China's economic development while using China forever as a giant farmland to feed the Russian metropolis. The PRC and USSR competed for influence over and trade with other states. The PRC wanted nuclear weapons for itself while the USSR wanted a nuclear monopoly within its sphere of influence.

These CPC bureaucrats were not hardened peasant leaders living and eating among the masses, they were wealthy officials living in mansions with servants, limousines, fancy food and bourgeois luxuries, even at the height of the Cultural Revolution. They were not mad scientists or crazy sectarians either, despite the irrationality of Maoist voluntarism. They may have howled with fanatical indignation about the craven treachery of modern revisionism, but what they really wanted was to be the top dogs, to replace Khrushchev and Brezhnev. The stratum of nobles around Mao ate from the Soviet trough for ten golden years, but they eventually reached the conclusion that to rise in the world they would have to: break free from Soviet protection, engage in radical economic experimentation to outpace Soviet and Western economic development, and launch a global sectarian movement to try and snatch control of world Communism.

The split happened when it did because the PRC no longer needed Soviet military support in the region, having used it to halt the march of US imperialism in Korea and Vietnam. A Chinese modern arms industry had been established in the late 1950's. The PRC used its new weapons to test the defenses of newly-independent India while the USSR was trying to befriend and trade with the same country, leading to the Sino-Indian war of 1962 in which the PRC and USSR opposed each other and broke off diplomatic relations.

The Sino-Soviet relationship steadily degenerated, the CPC and CPSU broke off fraternal party relations in 1964, the CPC began to describe the CPSU and USSR as "fascist" in 1967, border conflicts between the Soviet and Chinese armies broke out in 1968, and the PRC finally entered a tacit anti-Soviet alliance with US imperialism in 1971, giving political and military support to murderous neocolonial dictatorships in Zaire and Pakistan, arming parties in league with imperialism like UNITA in Angola and religious reactionaries in Afghanistan, and even launching a punitive attack on Vietnam in 1978 in response to the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. Cooperation with US imperialism was justified by the Maoist argument that the USSR was the most dangerous imperialist power threatening to attack China, replete with historical comparisons to Nazi Germany and Stalin's alliance with Western imperialism. Soviet troops were indeed amassed on the Chinese border and poised to attack at that time, but their excuse was protecting Siberia against a Maoist landgrab.


deStalinisation was a threat to Mao.
Yes it was, the Hundred Flowers Campaign turned out to be a catastrophe, since it was only ever intended to invite intellectual criticism of the party, but when workers started to protest and strike in 1957, the Chinese thaw ended with a crackdown against the proletariat and an "Anti-Rightist" purge against leftist writers. However, in spite of the ideological importance of de-Stalinization in the split, it was not the cause, since the split got even worse after 1964, when Khrushchev was overthrown and re-Stalinization began under Brezhnev.