The Sino-Soviet split (1956–1966) was the breaking of political relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), caused by doctrinal divergences arising from each of the two powers' different interpretation of Marxism–Leninism as influenced by the national interests of each country during the Cold War.[2] In the late 1950s and early 1960s, debates of ideological orthodoxy between the communist parties of the USSR and of the PRC became disputes about Soviet policies of de-Stalinization and peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West. Despite such background politics, to the Chinese public Mao Zedong proposed a belligerent attitude towards capitalist countries, an initial rejection of the Soviets' peaceful-coexistence policy, which he perceived as Marxist revisionism by the Russians.[2]
Since 1956—after Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin and Stalinism—China and Russia had progressively disagreed and diverged about orthodox interpretation of Marxist ideology. By 1961, intractable differences of philosophy provoked the Communist Party of China to formally denounce Soviet communism as the product of "Revisionist Traitors".[2] The Sino-Soviet split was about who would lead the revolution of world communism—to whom, China or Russia, would the vanguard parties of the world turn for aid and assistance?[3] In that vein, the USSR and the PRC competed for ideological leadership through their respective networks of communist parties in the countries of their spheres of influence.[4]
Geopolitically, the Sino-Soviet split was a pivotal event of the bi-polar Cold War (1945–1991) as important as the Berlin Wall (1961), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Vietnam War (1965–1975) because it facilitated the Sino-American rapprochement of the 1972 Nixon visit to China. Internationally, the geopolitical rivalry between communists—Chinese Stalinism and Russian peaceful coexistence—eliminated the myth that monolithic Communism was an actor in the 1947–1950 period of the Vietnam War and in world politics—such Realpolitik established the tri-polar geopolitics of the latter part of the Cold War.[5][6]
CHINESE COMMUNISM IS NOT THE SAME AS SOVIET