Onset
In 1959, Premier Khrushchev met with US President Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61) to decrease Soviet–American tensions and with the Western world in the Cold War. Moreover, the USSR was astonished by the Great Leap Forward, had renounced aiding Chinese nuclear weapons development, and refused to side with them in the Sino-Indian War (1962), by maintaining a moderate relation with India — actions deemed offensive by Mao as Chinese Leader. Hence, he perceived Khrushchev as too-appeasing with the West, despite Soviet caution in international politics that threatened nuclear warfare (i.e., the US, UK and USSR were nuclear powers by the late 1950s), wherein the USSR managed superpower confrontations such as the status of post-war Berlin.
At first, the Sino-Soviet split manifested itself indirectly; arguments between the CPSU and the CPC criticized the client states of the other; China denounced Yugoslavia and Tito, the USSR denounced Enver Hoxha and the People's Socialist Republic of Albania; but, in 1960, they criticized each other in the Romanian Communist Party congress, when Khrushchev and Peng Zhen openly argued. Premier Khrushchev insulted Chairman Mao Zedong as “a nationalist, an adventurist, and a deviationist”. In turn, Mao insulted Khrushchev as a Marxist revisionist, criticizing him as “patriarchal, arbitrary and tyrannical”. In follow-up, Khrushchev denounced China with an eighty-page letter to the conference.
Khrushchev also withdrew nearly all Soviet technical experts from China, leaving some major projects in an unfinished state. Many blueprints and specifications were also withdrawn.
In November 1960, at a congress of 81 Communist parties in Moscow, the Chinese argued with the Soviets and with most other Communist party delegations — yet compromised to avoid a formal ideologic splitting; nonetheless, in October 1961, at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union they again argued openly. In December, the USSR severed diplomatic relations with the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania, graduating the Soviet–Chinese ideological dispute from between political parties to between nation-states.
In 1962, the PRC and the USSR broke relations because of their international actions; Chairman Mao criticized Premier Khrushchev for withdrawing from fighting the US in the Cuban missile crisis (1962) — “Khrushchev has moved from adventurism to capitulationism”; Khrushchev replied that Mao’s confrontational policies would provoke a nuclear war. Simultaneously, the USSR sided with India against China in the Sino-Indian War (1962).
Read more about this topic: Sino-Soviet Split
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