The Sino-Soviet Rift and Chinese Policy Toward Vietnam, 19641968
KBreahooking the Ring of Encirclement Breaking the Ring of Encirclement The Sino-Soviet Rift and Chinese Policy toward Vietnam, 1964–1968 ✣ Nicholas Khoo Introduction The “secret speech” delivered by Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), at the CPSU’s Twentieth Congress in February 1956 was viewed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a serious error.1 The disagreements that emerged between Moscow and Beijing on this issue ushered in an extended period in which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union actively competed for inºuence both inside and outside the Communist world.2 Perhaps the most signiªcant consequence of their rivalry was the de facto termination of the Sino-Soviet alliance, a development that altered global and regional power re- lations.3 How did the failure of the Sino-Soviet alliance affect the triangular rela- tionship between the Chinese, Soviet, and Vietnamese Communist parties 1. A discussion of Mao’s immediate reaction to Khrushchev’s speech can be found in Yang Kuisong, Mao Zedong yu Mosike de enen yuanyuan (Jiangxi, China: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1999), pp. 371– 400. See also, Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 1, Contradictions among the People 1956–57 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 39–56. For an analysis of the escalating Sino-Soviet conºict before the de facto termination of the alliance, see Donald Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conºict, 1956–61 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). 2. For contemporary analysis of the escalating Sino-Soviet conºict after the de facto termination of the alliance, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conºict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1967), pp.
[Show full text]