Nobody Expects the Maoist Inquisition! 

How Mao Tested Khrushchev and

 Caused the Sino-Soviet Split, 1958-1959

Cameron Nielsen

Introduction
In 1949, shortly after founding the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong traveled to Moscow to beg for an alliance with his stronger neighbor, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Mao had proclaimed that “China has stood up,” and then proved it by uniting China under one government for the
first time since the abdication of the Emperor in 1912. However, his country
 was still desperately poor with no geopolitical standing. China needed a staunch ally, and the USSR, which had mentored the Communists’ revolution, was the
natural choice. When the alliance was announced in 1950, it bore the fingerprints
of Stalin’s unfair treatment of his allies, but it was still what China needed—a legitimizing emblem, backed up with Soviet aid to develop the economy. Yet 1961, just eleven years later, saw the Chinese denouncing the Russians as
traitors to Communism, and 1969 saw the two countries fighting a brief border
 war. What happened? While there were many factors leading to the Sino-Soviet Split, one of the most important proximate causes was a pattern of almost bizarrely bad diplomacy, mostly on the Chinese side. If it were not for jarring provocations such as the infamous “swimming pool meeting” in 1958, the split may have not occurred until much later, and certainly would not have been as precipitous. When the behavior of Mao and other Chinese leaders is analyzed, it becomes clear that this was their intent. The evidence is strong that the 1958 Khrushchev-Mao meetings were crucial moments when this decision was made
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