One of the first acts of Khrushchev upon becoming General Secretary was to denounce many facets of life in the USSR under Stalin, including the cult of personality. In his Secret Speech of February of 1956, made to ranking members of the Soviet government, but leaked to a global audience a short while later, the denigration of Stalin became a bone of contention between the People's Republic of China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (Mao's China and Kim Il Sung's North Korea) who were still busily constructing a personality cult around their leaders.

So how were Mao and Khrushchev's personality cults different?

Mao had one, Khrushchev did not.