Hello! I'm currently studying the Sino-Soviet split, and I was a little confused as to what effect the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 had on Sino-Soviet relations. I know Mao feared the loosening grip the Soviet Union seemed to have on its satellite states after de-Stalinisation, but after Khrushchev's quick and swift dealing with the Hungarian Uprising, shouldn't that have comforted Mao in some way? Why did the two countries keep dividing? Was it inevitable, or did the Hungarian Uprising change things?
The problem was that the dilemma of Hungary was a win-win for Mao and the Soviet leadership knew this. In the run up to 1956, the PRC had increasingly critiqued the Soviet Union as being ideologically corrupted both in public and in private. The rise of alternative youth culture, consumerism, and the normalization of relations with the West were all alleged evidence that the Warsaw Pact states were practicing an effete form of communism. Mao was by the mid-1950s positioning both himself and the PRC as the hope to rekindle a supposedly flagging movement for world revolution. The PRC sponsored trips for Warsaw Pact students and other groups to visit China and see ideology in action. At the same time, the invasion of Hungary led to another PRC critique of the USSR, namely that it was acting like just another great power. This was one of the crucial sticking points in the Sino-Soviet alliance and not a small reason why it failed. Moscow expected its allies to be dependent upon their elder Soviet brother, but China refused to continence anything that smacked of an imperial relationship.
Khrushchev and the rest of the Soviet leadership really resented this interference. When Zhou Enlai visited Moscow shortly after the invasion, he asserted the Soviets that the Warsaw Pact needed to employ Chinese methods to create a more ideologically pure populace. Such hectoring did not go over well with his Soviet hosts. The invasion also cost the Soviets vital political capital in terms of their global prestige and Moscow knew Mao was capitalizing on this in the Third World even as he applauded the Soviet's return to a Stalinist hardline. Mao's prescription for the global communist movement, a new focus on ideological fervor, was not the direction that Khrushchev wanted to reorient the Soviet Union towards after the death of Stalin. In short, whether Beijing approved or disapproved of Soviet actions was not precisely what was galling to Moscow, it was the fact that Mao had the temerity to question the Soviets' actions at all.
Sources
Jersild, Austin. The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina, 2014.
Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton, 2003.