Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...different national interests, different economies, and different histories. Khrushchev, the ruler of a nation that has at last begun to gain some material rewards, argues that people are not interested in war or revolution but in peaceful prosperity, and that rocket-rattling will only drive millions away from Communism. Mao, ruler of a country with a lot less to lose, master of a peasantry whose appetites demand a bowl of rice, not a TV set or a car, replies in effect that he is not running a popularity contest with the West. Power cannot be won by wooing adherents...
From the start, Russian national interests also shaped Moscow's attitude toward the Chinese Communists. In the 1920s, Stalin ruthlessly sacrificed Mao's Communist movement to Chiang Kaishek, whom he supported because he considered him a strong Soviet ally who would fight both Western and Japanese threats to Russian power. Decimated by Chiang, the ragged Chinese Communists survived in the caves of Yenan and eventually went on to conquer China, despite Stalin's warning that they were backward and not ready for revolution. After the war, Stalin sent Mao a Russian handbook of partisan strategy against...
...Thus Mao was beholden to no one, least of all Stalin, for his victory. Yet ironically, the first open ideological crack in the Moscow-Peking partnership came over Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin...
...Mao had sent a message to the 20th Party Congress lavishly praising the dead dictator. Without bothering to consult the Chinese, Khrushchev delivered his famed "secret speech" to the Congress, in which he suddenly unmasked Stalin as a megalomaniacal tyrant. Peking was stunned. Mao felt-correctly, as was proved a few months later by the uprisings in Poland and Hungary-that the destalinization drive would touch off a wave of unrest. Even though Stalin had bullied and betrayed the Chinese Communists (as well as helped them, at a price, during the Korean war), Mao believed in Stalin's principle...
...Committee hastily called a secret session; a month later, Red China defiantly announced that, despite what the Kremlin had to say, Stalin's achievements outweighed his errors. On foreign policy Peking agreed-for the moment-to back Khrushchev's talk of peaceful coexistence with the West, since Mao himself was then energetically pushing the "Bandung spirit" of sweet neighborliness in Asia...