Sino-Soviet rift
prosoviet
Pro-Chinese
Unbound North Korea and Yugoslavia .
Somalia was pro-Soviet until 1977.
Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea) was Pro-Chinese until 1979.
The Sino-Soviet rift was a conflict in relations between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China . It began in the late 1950s, peaked in 1969, and continued into the late 1980s. The struggle between Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong for leadership in the communist movement ended in split.
background
In the 1950s, the People's Republic of China, with the help of an army of Soviet advisors, transformed the Chinese economy into a socialist central government economy modeled on the Soviet Union. The strategy was to quickly build up heavy industry and pull the labor needed for it from agriculture in order to finance industrialization.
In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev visited the People's Republic of China, returning the former Russian Port Arthur area to China. A stronger economic cooperation was also agreed.
In February 1956 Khrushchev complained of the wrongdoings of Stalinism on the XX. Party congress of the CPSU . He also restored relations between Tito's Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In his speeches, Khrushchev rejected the Stalin regime, announced that it would dissolve the Cominform , and downplayed the Marxist-Leninist theory of the inevitable armed conflict between capitalism and socialism . Mao did not agree with this development and had the impression that the Soviet leadership was increasingly distancing itself from the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and bringing about the ultimate victory of communism.
In the late 1950s, Mao developed his own theories of how China could enter communism directly by mobilizing its vast reservoir of labor. His considerations resulted in a great leap forward .
From 1958, when the Soviet Union refused to give China political backing in the Quemoy crisis , a rift broke out between the two communist powers.
Beginning of the rift
In 1959, concerned about the chaos in China after the Great Leap Forward , the Soviet Union withdrew its promise to help China develop nuclear weapons . In the same year Khrushchev met on the one hand with the President of the United States , Eisenhower , on the other hand he refused to support the People's Republic of China in its border conflict with India . In Mao's opinion, Khrushchev was ready to make many concessions to the West.
The Soviet leadership tried to find compromises in conflicts in order to avoid the outbreak of a nuclear war . She saw Mao as a risk and was unwilling to help him develop nuclear weapons that he could use in the Korean War or in Taiwan. They also saw the policy of the Great Leap Forward as evidence that Mao was not a real Marxist .
For a time the polemics between China and the USSR were indirect. In mutual verbal attacks, the Chinese accused Josip Broz Tito and the Soviets the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha , an ally of China, as the representative of the respective power. The dispute became public in June 1960 when Khrushchev and Peng Zhen publicly clashed at a congress of the Romanian Communist Party .
In November of the same year, the Chinese delegation quarreled with the Soviet delegation at a meeting of 81 communist parties in Moscow. In the end, however, a resolution was passed that avoided a formal split in the communist movement. At the 22nd party congress of the CPSU in October 1961, the differences of opinion flared up again. In December, the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Albania. A dispute between parties had become a dispute between states.
In 1962 Mao Khrushchev criticized him for having given in to the crisis surrounding the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba ; Khrushchev "[develop from] an adventurer to a capitulator". Khrushchev argued that Mao's policies led to nuclear war. In the same year the Soviet Union supported India in its brief border war with China . As a result, the different ideological positions were presented to each other in writing. In June 1963, the Chinese side published an open letter entitled "Proposal for the General Line of the International Communist Movement". The Soviet side replied with an "Open letter from the Central Committee of the CPSU to all party organizations, to all communists in the Soviet Union."
There was a brief pause in the polemics when Khrushchev was deposed in October 1964. In November, the Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Enlai , visited Moscow to negotiate with the new leadership under Brezhnev and Kosygin . He then reported that the Soviet leadership saw no reason to change their policy. Mao described Soviet politics as "Khrushchevism without Khrushchev," and the war of words continued.
From rift to confrontation
The beginning of the Cultural Revolution not only disrupted contacts between the two countries, it also brought China into isolation from the rest of the world. The permission of China to the Soviet Union to transport arms and supplies through China to Vietnam in order to support North Vietnam in the war against the South and the United States is an exception.
After the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, in addition to the Labor Party of Albania, only the Communist Party of Indonesia supported the People's Republic of China. However, the Indonesian Communist Party was crushed by the wave of persecution and mass murders in 1965–1966 . Small Maoist parties were founded in many countries, but they had little influence.
In January 1967, the Red Guards besieged the Soviet embassy in Beijing . Although diplomatic relations were never officially severed, they were practically on hold.
In 1968, the Soviet Union moved massive troops to the Chinese border, especially the border with the Chinese region of Xinjiang . While in 1961 around twelve half-strength Soviet divisions and 200 aircraft were stationed at the border, at the end of 1968 there were 25 divisions, 1,200 aircraft and 120 medium-range missiles .
Tensions on the border intensified until 1969 when fighting broke out on the Ussuri River on March 2 . Primarily, these disputes were about the minor dispute as to whether the island of Zhenbao Dao (Russian name: Damanski ) in Ussuri was neutral territory or whether it belonged to the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China. The American journalist Harrison Salisbury published a book called The Coming War Between Russia and China , and in August 1969 the Soviet leadership hinted at a nuclear attack on the Lop Nor nuclear test site in China.
In September 1969, Kosygin made a secret visit to Beijing and negotiated with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, and the fighting ceased. Negotiations on the border issue began in October. Although no agreement was reached, the meetings maintained a minimum of diplomatic communication.
In 1970, Mao realized that he could not challenge the Soviet Union and the United States and suppress domestic unrest at the same time. That year he also decided that the Soviet Union was the greater danger; so he sought a way of detente with the United States, even though the Vietnam War was at its height and anti-American propaganda was in full swing. In July 1971, Henry Kissinger , the US President's security advisor, secretly visited Beijing.
In early September 1971, Lin Biao , Mao's designated successor, tried to oust him in a coup. But on September 13th he was killed in a plane crash, presumably while trying to flee to the Soviet Union. The most radical phase of the Cultural Revolution ended with his death. In February 1972, Kissinger's secret diplomacy was followed by the official visit of US President Richard Nixon , together with the US national table tennis team (hence the name ping-pong diplomacy ). The Soviets were initially annoyed, but later negotiated with Nixon themselves, and a triangular relationship developed between Washington, Beijing and Moscow. With that, the worst period of confrontation between the Soviet Union and China was over.
The rivalry between China and the Soviet Union spread to Africa and the Middle East, where each of the two powers supported various competing parties, movements and states.
Return to normal
The détente accelerated after the end of the armed conflict and after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the arrest of the Gang of Four and the start of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms .
But even after Mao's death there were several foreign policy conflicts due to the different national interests of the two countries:
The first major confrontation took place in Indochina . The end of the Vietnam War resulted in pro-Soviet governments in Vietnam and Laos and a pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia . When ethnic Vietnamese were persecuted and murdered in Cambodia and fighting broke out in the border regions, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 and overthrew Pol Pot's regime . The Chinese government saw this as a provocation and started a "punitive expedition" to North Vietnam. The Sino-Vietnamese War ended with the Chinese withdrawing. The Soviet Union condemned China but took no military action.
In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan , where the communist government threatened to overthrow. The Chinese government saw this as part of a plan to encircle China. It allied with the United States and Pakistan to aid the Islamist forces in Afghanistan and repel the Soviet invasion.
Shortly before his death, the Soviet party and state leader Leonid Brezhnev adopted a conciliatory tone towards China in a speech in Baku. This paved the way for a Chinese minister to attend Brezhnev's funeral in 1982 and for hesitant efforts to ease tensions. Deng Xiaoping called for three obstacles to be removed in order to improve Sino-Soviet relations:
- The concentration of Soviet troops on the Chinese border and in Mongolia
- Soviet support for the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia
- The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
When Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet party leader in 1985 , his goal was to normalize relations with China. The armed forces on the border with China have been greatly reduced, normal economic relations have been initiated and the border issue has been excluded. The withdrawal of the Soviet army from Afghanistan further improved relations. However, the ideological differences of the 1960s were not resolved, and official relations between the two communist parties were not established. With relations between China and the Soviet Union still chilled, the American administration under President Ronald Reagan saw China as a natural counterweight to the Soviet Union; this led to American military aid for the People's Liberation Army .
Gorbachev visited China in May 1989 to consolidate improving relations. This visit took place shortly before the Tiananmen massacre , which gave the latter event a very high profile in international media coverage.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Wolfram Eberhard : History of China. From the beginning to the present . Kröner, Stuttgart, 3rd, ext. 1980 edition, ISBN 3-520-41303-5 , p. 418.
- ↑ Files on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany (January 1 to March 31, 1962), p. 18
- ^ Home law for Russians in stolen areas. In: Der Spiegel . July 7, 1969. Retrieved October 29, 2016 .
- ^ Harrison E. Salisbury: "War Between Russia and China". In: Der Spiegel . February 9, 1970. Retrieved October 29, 2016 .