Sino-Soviet Split

The Sino-Soviet split (1960–1989) was the worsening of political and ideological relations between 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 Russian national interests, and from the régimes' respective interpretations of Marxism: Maoism and Marxism–Leninism.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, ideological debate between the Communist parties of Russia 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.

Moreover, since 1956, 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", i.e., the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, headed by Nikita Krushchev.

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 in 1971. Relations between China and the Soviet Union remained tense well into the 1980s, and were not considered 'normalized' until the visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Beijing in 1989.