Sino-Soviet split

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sino-Soviet split was the gradual worsening of relations between two of the world's most powerful communist states, China and the Soviet Union, during the Cold War. At its peak in the autumn of 1969, it nearly ended in nuclear annihilation. On the 18th of August that year, Boris N. Davydov, the Second Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, raised the prospect of a Soviet nuclear strike against China's atomic installations. Three days later, the US sent a secret telegram to its embassies worldwide warning that the Soviets had set in motion measures that could allow them a variety of military options. The leaders of China had already fled Beijing. Over 940,000 soldiers, more than four thousand planes, and more than six hundred ships had been put on combat alert.

  How did two nations bound by a formal treaty of friendship, and sharing the same communist ideology, arrive at the brink of nuclear war? What caused Mao Zedong to call Nikita Khrushchev a revisionist traitor? And how did a quarrel between two communist parties reshape the entire geometry of the Cold War, ultimately pushing China toward the one country both had defined as the enemy?

• 2. Reluctant Partners

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  Joseph Stalin's relationship with Mao Zedong was never one of equals. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Stalin ordered Mao to cooperate with Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist Kuomintang rather than pursue the communist revolution. Mao obeyed. After Japan surrendered, Stalin advised Mao again not to seize power and instead to honor the 1945 USSR-KMT Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. Mao complied once more. Three months after the Japanese surrender, in November 1945, when Chiang resisted the annexation of Tannu Uriankhai, Stalin broke his own treaty and ordered Soviet commander Rodion Malinovsky to hand the Chinese communists Japan's leftover weapons.

  The communists defeated Chiang, and in 1950 Mao and Stalin formalized their alliance with the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. Stalin's side of the bargain included a loan of $300 million, military guarantees against a Japanese attack, and the transfer of the Chinese Eastern Railway, Port Arthur, and Dalian to Chinese control. In return, the PRC recognized the Mongolian People's Republic. By 1955, the arrangement seemed to be bearing fruit: 60% of China's exports went to the Soviet Union, and roughly 10,000 Soviet technicians and 1,500 political advisors were working inside China.

  Yet Mao had always been more than a student of Soviet communism. During the Chinese Civil War in 1947, he dispatched the American journalist Anna Louise Strong to the West bearing political documents, asking her to share them with party leaders in the United States and Europe, but pointedly saying it was not necessary to take them to Moscow. Strong later wrote that Mao's intellectual achievement had been to change Marxism from a European form to an Asiatic form, in ways that neither Marx nor Lenin could dream. That sense of independent authority would soon make the Soviet Union's leadership of world communism intolerable to him.

• 3. The Speech That Broke Everything

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  In early 1956, Khrushchev delivered the speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, denouncing Stalin's Great Purge of Soviet society, the armed forces, and the party. For Mao, this was not just a criticism of a dead man. Mao had modeled his own leadership on Stalin and had built his political legitimacy around the same authoritarian style. Khrushchev's de-Stalinization threatened to delegitimize Mao at home.

  The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 deepened that anxiety. It had required military force to suppress, and to Mao it demonstrated that de-Stalinization could produce exactly the kind of revolt he feared in China and in China's sphere of influence. In response, the Chinese Communist Party denounced Soviet de-Stalinization as revisionism and reaffirmed its Stalinist course. That year, Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign, offering citizens limited political freedoms partly to head off such discontent, but closed it down when the criticism turned bluntly against him.

  By 1958, the tone inside China had turned sharply anti-Soviet. Chinese sensitivities over sovereignty hardened, especially where Taiwan was concerned. When the Soviets proposed a joint radio transmitter in April, China rejected it and counter-proposed sole Chinese ownership. A Soviet proposal for a joint strategic submarine fleet, made the following July, was also flatly rejected. Khrushchev flew secretly to Beijing in early August to rescue the submarine proposal. Mao refused. The only agreement reached was to build the previously rejected radio station, but with Soviet loans.

• 4. Nuclear Fears and Reckless Words

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  At the 1957 International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties in Moscow, Mao made remarks about nuclear war that alarmed even his allies. According to various sources including official CCP publications, he said: "I'm not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn't matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left." Khrushchev later recalled that the audience was dead silent. Antonin Novotny, then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, complained afterward that Czechoslovakia had only twelve million people and could not afford that calculus.

  The Soviet Union had already been helping China develop its nuclear program. But Mao's nuclear brinkmanship during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in late 1958, combined with ongoing US-Soviet disarmament talks, convinced Moscow to renege on its 1957 commitment to deliver a model nuclear bomb to China. When the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was agreed among the US, the UK, and the USSR in 1963, forbidding nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater, Mao read it as the existing nuclear powers conspiring to prevent China from ever joining their ranks.

  On the 16th of October 1964, China detonated its first nuclear device, a uranium-235 implosion-fission weapon with an explosive yield of 22 kilotons of TNT, and publicly acknowledged the Soviet technical assistance that had helped make it possible.

• 5. Public Rupture

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  The final face-to-face meeting between Mao and Khrushchev took place on the 2nd of October 1959, when Khrushchev visited Beijing to mark the tenth anniversary of the People's Republic. By that point, the Chinese were deliberately humiliating him. No honor guard appeared. No Chinese leader delivered a welcome speech. When Khrushchev insisted on speaking himself, no microphone was provided. His speech praised US President Eisenhower, whom he had recently met, a calculated insult to his communist host. The two leaders would not meet again for the next thirty years.

  In June 1960, Khrushchev withdrew 1,400 Soviet technicians from China and cancelled around 200 joint scientific projects. Chinese records put the number at 1,390 technicians and 600 cancelled contracts. That same year, at a Communist Party congress in Bucharest, the CCP's senior officer Peng Zhen quarrelled openly with Khrushchev, who had called Mao a nationalist, a geopolitical adventurist, and an ideological deviationist. Peng replied that Khrushchev was a revisionist whose rule made him patriarchal, arbitrary, and tyrannical.

  In 1960, Ho Chi Minh, uniquely among Marxist-Leninist world leaders, attempted to mediate the growing tensions. On the 14th of August 1960, Ho attended a meeting in Sochi with Khrushchev and several other leaders to discuss the China problem. When Ho later met with Deng Xiaoping, Deng used what Ho had shared against the Soviets. The limited influence of North Vietnam within the communist world meant Ho's effort failed. By December 1961, the USSR broke diplomatic relations with Albania, escalating the disputes from a party-level quarrel to a national-government confrontation.

• 6. The Brink of Nuclear War

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  After the Zhenbao Island incident in March 1969, the Soviet Union began planning a massive nuclear strike on China. Soviet diplomat Arkady Shevchenko later wrote that the Soviet leadership had come close to using nuclear weapons, and that Defense Minister Andrei Grechko had called for unrestricted use of a multimegaton bomb. On the 18th of August 1969, a Soviet embassy official in Washington raised the idea of striking China's nuclear installations at a lunch meeting.

  The US informed certain news outlets of what it had learned. Reports appeared in the Washington Post on the 28th of August describing a Soviet plan to strike Chinese cities including Beijing, Changchun, and Anshan, as well as nuclear sites at Jiuquan, Xichang, and Lop Nur. Soviet Pravda, also on the 28th of August, warned that a war with China would involve lethal armaments and modern means of delivery, and would leave no continent untouched.

  On the 14th of October 1969, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued an urgent evacuation order requiring all leaders to leave Beijing by the 20th of October. Mao traveled to Wuhan. Lin Biao went to Suzhou. Zhou Enlai remained in Beijing, overseeing operations from underground nuclear-proof facilities in the Western Hills. On the 17th of October, Lin Biao ordered all People's Liberation Army forces onto combat alert. On the 15th of October, according to a number of sources, President Nixon had the Soviet side informed that the United States would launch a nuclear attack on approximately 130 Soviet cities if the USSR struck China. The Soviets stood down. Both governments returned to diplomatic negotiations, and the first formal border talks opened in Beijing on the 20th of October 1969.

• 7. A Reshaped World

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  In July 1971, Henry Kissinger traveled to Beijing to arrange President Nixon's visit to China. The rapprochement that followed in 1972 was a direct product of the Sino-Soviet split: Mao needed a counterweight against Soviet military pressure, and the US saw an opening. Kissinger's visit offended Brezhnev enough that the Soviet leader immediately sought his own summit with Nixon, transforming what had been a two-sided Cold War into a triangular one.

  Across the Third World, China and the Soviet Union competed for influence by funding rival parties and militias. They backed opposing sides in conflicts across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In Southeast Asia, Vietnamese communist leadership was divided over which patron to favor. The pro-Soviet faction led by Le Duan eventually prevailed, and as China moved closer to the United States, Vietnam saw it as a betrayal. Soviet military aid to Vietnam rose from $75-$125 million in 1977 to $600-$800 million in 1978. On the 1st of January 1979, the US and China formally established diplomatic relations. Within weeks, China invaded Vietnam, starting the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War.

  Normalization between China and the Soviet Union came slowly. In March 1982, Brezhnev delivered a speech in Tashkent appealing for improved relations, recalling the time when the two countries had been united by friendship and comradely cooperation. Full normalization came only in 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev visited China and shook Deng Xiaoping's hand. The meeting took place just before the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June 1989, an event on which Soviet officials, Soviet media, and the Soviet public held sharply diverging views.