Abstract
This chapter discusses the impact of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on Sino-Soviet relations. The Twentieth Congress raised the Stalin issue, which prompted a series of deep questions regarding the socialist road and development, and had a latent impact on the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations. According to available records, Mao differed little from Khrushchev on the Stalin issue. This chapter argues that the Twentieth Congress had no negative impact on Sino-Soviet relations. Subsequent developments show that the Sino-Soviet relationship became closer and without signs of serious divergence in the wake of the Twentieth Congress. But public “self-criticism” of the CPSU and the unveiling of Stalin’s mistakes lowered the CPSU’s prestige and shook its leadership role in the socialist camp.
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Notes
- 1.
Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 46.
- 2.
See Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012).
- 3.
For details on the Twentieth Congress and the origins of Khrushchev’s secret speech, see Shen and Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, pp. 134–41.
- 4.
It was during the Moscow Conference in November 1957 that the CCP stated its different views on peaceful transition, and it was during the Sino-Soviet polemics in September 1963 that the CCP publicly announced its different views on peaceful transition.
- 5.
Whereas the Soviets stressed all-out detente, the Chinese paid more attention to peaceful coexistence with its neighbors.
- 6.
Fedor M. Burlatskii, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring: The Era of Khrushchev through the Eyes of his Adviser (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), p. 73.
- 7.
For details, see Elidor Mëhilli, “Defying De-Stalinization: Albania’s 1956,” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 13, no. 4 (Fall 2011), pp. 4–56.
- 8.
Roy Medvedev, Khrushchev: A Biography, tr. Brian Pearce (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), p. 86.
- 9.
A day before formal publication of the article, the CCP CC issued a circular, requesting that “Party committees at every level should organize study sessions among party and youth league members as well as non-party personnel, and should send progress reports on those issues that had been discussed to the CCP Propaganda Department.”
- 10.
“On the Ten Major Relationships,” 25 April 1956, in Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, vol. 5 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), p. 304.
- 11.
“Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal, and Autonomous Region Party Committees,” in Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 5, p. 354.
- 12.
Gao Hua, How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, tr. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, 2018), pp. 661–705; Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 25–86.
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Shen, Z. (2020). The Twentieth CPSU Congress and the Eighth CCP Congress, 1956. In: Shen, Z. (eds) A Short History of Sino-Soviet Relations, 1917–1991. China Connections. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8641-1_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8641-1_11
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