Sino-Soviet Split

Sino-Soviet split
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	中蘇交惡
Simplified Chinese	中苏交恶
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhōngsū jiāoè
Russian name
Russian	Советско–китайский раскол
Romanization	Sovetsko–kitayskiy raskol

Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyin	Zhōngsū jiāoè

The Sino-Soviet split (1960–89) was the deterioration of political and ideological relations between the neighboring states of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) during the Cold War. In the 1960s, China and the Soviet Union were the two largest communist states in the world. The doctrinal divergence derived from Chinese and Soviet national interests, and from the regimes' different interpretations of Marxism–Leninism.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, ideological debate between the communist parties of the USSR and China also concerned the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West. Yet, to the Chinese public, Mao Zedong proposed a belligerent attitude towards capitalist countries, an initial rejection of peaceful coexistence, which he perceived as Marxist revisionism from the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, since 1956 (when Nikita Khrushchev denounced the legacy of Stalin), China and the USSR had progressively diverged about Marxist ideology, and, by 1961, when the doctrinal differences proved intractable, the Communist Party of China formally denounced the Soviet variety of communism as a product of "Revisionist Traitors".

The split concerned the leadership of world communism. The USSR had a network of communist parties it supported; China now created its own rival network to battle it out for local control of the left in numerous countries. Lorenz M. Lüthi argues:

The divide fractured the international communist movement at the time and opened the way for the warming of relations between the United States and China under Richard Nixon and Mao in 1971. Relations between China and the Soviet Union remained tense until the visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Beijing in 1989.

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