page_title: Sino-Soviet split
section_title: Reluctant co-belligerents
hierarchical_section_title: Sino-Soviet split / Origins / Reluctant co-belligerents
caption_attribution_description: 中文（繁體）‎: 重慶會談 蔣介石與毛澤東合影
context_page_description: The Sino-Soviet split was the breaking of political relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, caused by doctrinal divergences that arose from their different interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism, as influenced by their respective geopolitics during the Cold War. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sino-Soviet debates about the interpretation of orthodox Marxism became specific disputes about the USSR's policies of national de-Stalinization and international peaceful coexistence with the Western world, which Mao decried as Marxist revisionism. Against that ideological background, China took a belligerent stance towards the West, and publicly rejected the USSR's policy of peaceful coexistence between the Eastern bloc and the Western bloc. In addition, China resented the closer Soviet ties with India, and Moscow feared Mao was too nonchalant about the horrors of nuclear war.
  In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and Stalinism in the speech On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences and began the de-Stalinization of the USSR.
context_section_description: In the course of the Second World War (1939–45), the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the nationalist Kuomintang party (KMT) set aside their civil war in order to fight, defeat, and expel Imperial Japan from China. To that end, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, ordered Mao Zedong, leader of the CPC, to co-operate with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the KMT, in fighting the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Following the surrender of Japan (15 August 1945), the CPC and the KMT resumed their civil war, which the communists won by 1949.
  At war's end, Stalin advised Mao to not seize political power at that time, and, instead, to collaborate with Chiang due to the USSR–KMT Treaty of Friendship and Alliance (1945); in communist solidarity, Mao abided Stalin. Yet, three months after the Japanese surrender, in November 1945, when Chiang opposed the annexation of Tannu Uriankhai (Mongolia) to the USSR, Stalin broke the treaty requiring the Red Army's withdrawal from Manchuria (giving Mao regional control) and ordered General Rodion Malinovsky to give to the Chinese communists the Japanese leftover weapons. 
  In the post-war 1945–1950 period, the United States partly financed Chiang, his nationalist political party, and the National Revolutionary Army. However Washington put heavy pressure on Chiang to form a joint government with the Communists.  American envoy George Marshall spent 13 months in China trying without success to broker peace. In the concluding, three-year period of the Chinese Civil War (1947–1949), between the KMT and the CPC, the Chinese Communist Revolution (1946–1949) defeated and expelled the KMT from continental China. Consequently, the KMT retreated to Taiwan (December 1949).
caption: In the Asian theatre of the Second World War (1939–45), Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of the KMT expediently allied with the Communist Mao Zedong of the CPC to fight the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) as reluctant co-belligerents to expel Imperial Japan from China; post-war, they resumed the Chinese Civil War (1946–49).
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