| Based on research in Russian, German, Polish, and Hungarian archives, as well as on published Chinese-language documents, memoirs, and secondary literature, this dissertation provides a detailed analytical account of the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance of 1950.; The collapse of the alliance was the outcome of a complex web of developments in Chinese domestic politics, Sino-Soviet relations, China's role in the socialist world, and international relations. The Chinese Communists stood in the tradition of other Chinese modernizers, Thus the alliance was primarily instrumental, designed to accomplish the return of China to its former influence in world affairs. Although the temporary character of the alliance therefore embodied the seeds for a subsequent drifting apart, it cannot explain the intense ideological hostility that developed in the late 1950s.; Facing a structural crisis in the economy, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong in the mid-1950s reacted similarly to Stalin in the late 1920s by adopting economic policies that would allow China to jump into a higher stage of economic development. Yet, the outcome in China was even more catastrophic than in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. Faced with internal challenges, Mao afterward pushed and systematically exploited the worsening of Sino-Soviet relations for what he believed to be his domestic, political survival.; Just at the time when Mao adopted these policies, the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev launched de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. Thus, in the long-term, both communist powers set out on political and economic development paths radically opposed to each other. Misunderstandings, the lack of communication, personality conflicts, and contingencies acerbated the deterioration of relations, and even carried on into the international communist movement. Afterward, China's destructive diplomatic behavior greatly undermined the unity of the socialist camp, and compromised its security in the Cold War confrontation with the Western world.; The United States had tried to undermine the Sino-Soviet alliance from its very inception, but was able to apply a wedge only through nuclear disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union starting in the late 1950s. The nuclear test ban treaty of 1963, the first tangible result of international disarmament, worsened Sino-Soviet relations additionally. |
