At the formal level, the relationship was characterized by a degree of mutual misunderstandings that evolved into suspicions and a general distrust on both sides. With the conclusions of hostilities in 1945, Stalin desired for Mao to continue his wartime collaboration with the KMT and Chiang Kai-Shek. Stalin believed not only would the KMT prevail in a civil war, but that civil war would destroy China. Stalin gave Mao a diktat in August 1945 that he should travel to Chungking and negotiate with Chiang or "his stand would be repudiated in China and abroad." The Chungking had the opposite effect than Stalin intended. Mao's meetings with Chiang reenforced within him the idea that he could win a civil war; Mao would later claim that Chiang was "a corpse and no one believes him anymore."The communist victory came as much a shock to Moscow as to Washington. Although the Red Army turned over some Japanese war material to the CCP, they largely kept the best equipment and destroyed the remainder. Mao's victory emerged as a fait accompli for the newly-formed PRC as the USSR could not repudiate a successful communist revolution.

Although contemporary American Cold War discourse made much of the Sino-Soviet friendship treaties, the diplomatic agreements between the two powers was tense and riven with contradictions. The Soviets expected that alliances with China would follow the pattern they had set up with Eastern Europe: a series of mutually reenforcing relationships that would chiefly benefit the Soviet Union. While it is tempting to castigate this as Soviet (and by extension Great Russian) chauvinism, the Soviet's position was that they were the senior partner within the Marxist-Leninist camp and protecting the USSR was by their logic the best strategy for the global communist movement. The Chinese on the other hand, were acutely sensitive to any unequal relationship with a foreign power. For many Chinese, the experience of the Western and Japanese informal empires of trade agreements and other disadvantageous treaties made them leery of any treaty that was not equitable. Thus the technological exchanges between the USSR and the PRC were the source of a great deal of acrimony. The Chinese frequently complained that Soviet engineers acted in a boorish manner not unlike that of Westerners prior to the establishment of the PRC. On the other side, the Soviets felt that the Chinese were not paying the actual value of technological assistance. A salient example of this tension is the debate over industrial blueprints for factories and machinery. The Chinese expected industrial blueprints to be provided at cost according to their estimation of the ruble-yuan exchange rate, and the USSR often balked at this. The Chinese then went to the Eastern bloc to resolve this blueprint impasse, obtaining them from the East Germans. The Soviets saw this as meddling within their own bloc and it undermined the Soviet claims to intellectual and developmental primacy within the Warsaw Pact as German engineering was just as capable as Soviet.

The Chinese approach to the Eastern Europe demonstrates another arena in which the Sino-Soviet relationship swiftly devolved into acrimony. Although the Soviets expected Eastern Europe to be a pliant buffer zone of satellite states, in practice the "little-Stalins" had a limited degree of autonomy. Their relationship with the PRC allowed them greater diplomatic and economic support as Mao was ideologically kosher. In both 1956 Poland and Hungary, the Chinese weighed their options as to whether back the Soviets or the Eastern Europeans. Although they eventually backed the USSR, the latter's officials resented Chinese interference within the politics of the bloc and Mao positioning himself as the bloc's unifier. Among the non-aligned world, Mao's calls for more radicalized activity were at odds with the Thaw's desire for a more peaceful competition and coexistence with the West. As the relationship deteriorated Mao castigated the leadership of the USSR as rightists and the Soviet officials began to portray Mao as a the head of a corrupt government that betrayed the revolutionary ideals of the Chinese people. Soviet public pronouncements would characterize Maoist agrarian-based ideology as a retrograde step that the PRC took in spite of the advice of the USSR.

In the end, both sides blamed the other for the split and in hindsight, both were correct.

Sources

Jersild, Austin. The Sino-Soviet Alliance An International History. Chapel Hill, [North Carolina] : The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Spector, Ronald H. In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia. New York: Random House, 2007.

Ward, Christopher J. Brezhnev's Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism. Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.