China’s actual policy, regardless of what the party may think or feel is one of survival and bettering the conditions of the Chinese people at any cost. It’s that simple. Internationalism is dead. Maybe one day it can be revived but for now it’s every socialist project for itself.

In regards to Angola situation, China actually initially supported all three of them, providing support to FNLA, UNITA, and MPLA. The Chinese official position was that they were all “brotherly comrades” fighting for the same goal of Angolan liberation from Portuguese colonization. The Chinese even supported MPLA as early as 1958. These Chinese official position was that their role was only to help Angola become independent, and then let the Angolan people decide what kind of government they want after the fact, without interference from foreign powers.

This plan was disrupted when the Soviets declared MPLA the only legitimate revolutionary organization and then started heavily militarily backing them to take over all of Angola, which led to an outbreak of all-out civil war. The Chinese condemned this as interfering in Angola’s internal affairs, starting a very long bloody civil war, and believed that the Soviets were only doing this to establish a military presence in Angola to seize their resources. And thus the Chinese withdrew support from the MPLA around April 1974, but eventually withdrew support from both FNLA and UNITA as well in October 1975.

Chinese Marxists tend to have rather different views from Soviet Marxists. The latter tended to justify any intervention at all costs to spread socialism. The former tended to argue that socialism is something that must come from the bottom-up through grassroots movements, i.e. people have to want socialism, and that imposing it from the outside from the top-down can be rather counterproductive as people would then see socialism as an outside colonizing system to fight against if they want their own independence.

Some further examples are Yugoslavia and Poland. Chinese Marxist literature tends to be more critical of Soviet treatment of these countries, with the Soviets labeling Yugoslavia’s Autonomous Socialism as revisionist, and suppressing the Eighth Plenum of the Polish United Workers’ Party which advocated for socialism with Polish characteristics. Chinese Marxists argue that, whether or not these other models of socialism would succeed or fail, it is not the role of a foreign socialist power to decide that for them. Stalin even openly declared that “socialism with X characteristics” doesn’t even exist and is itself an anti-communist position, that there can only be one socialism and that is necessarily the Stalin Model.

In China’s Century of Humiliation they were subjugated brutally by foreign powers, and so they started to see the Soviet approach as a kind of imperialism. This was not unique to Mao or even Mao’s own analysis. Not all Chinese leadership agreed that the USSR had returned to capitalism. Indeed, even after Mao died, the anti-Soviet policies carried on, because what Chinese leadership generally agreed upon, regardless of whether or not the USSR was socialist or capitalist, is that their method of spreading revolution was expansionist ultimately for their own benefit of their own system and not out of a genuine desire to liberate the world.

If you honestly buy into the idea that the primary reason China was hostile to the USSR under Mao’s rule was because of Khrushchev’s economic “revisionism,” then you would predict that after Mao, they would become more friendly. But Deng Xiaoping’s administration maintained this exact same policy, describing Soviet influence in these bordering regions as: 中苏关系正常化三大障碍‌ (the three major obstacles to the normalization of Sino-Soviet relations) often just shortened to 三大障碍‌ (the three major obstacles). The fear of Soviet expansion was a widespread fear and arguably much of Mao’s ideological justification for the split was really just a post-hoc justification for it.

The “three obstacles” referred to the fact that the Soviets had troops in Afghanistan on their western border, Mongolia on their northern border, and Vietnam on their southern border, and were basically surrounded. So, to understand why they’d make such a decision, you have to see it from the Chinese perspective: they just came out of being brutally oppressed over a century from expansionist powers, and they were surrounded at all sides by another power they started to see as expansionist, and so Chinese leadership started to see the USSR as an existential threat to their very existence. They then started to support anti-Soviet groups in these groups for that reason, to push out Soviet influence.

Khrushchev’s role was primarily his pulling out of the nuclear program with China. The USSR and China had been working together to research nuclear weapons such that China could become a nuclear power, but Khrushchev made a deal with the US which required, on the Soviet’s end of the bargain, to stop helping China build nukes. The USSR then pulled out of China, withdrew all their scientists, and even burned all the research and documents to try and prevent the Chinese from building nukes.

The “revisionism” was less about Khrushchev abandoning certain economic principles, but about him treating the Stalin Model as a dogmatic universal that should be enforced upon every country by force, and their own grassroots movements suppressed in order to do so. Stalin had expressed this to a degree but Khrushchev made it far worse to the point where the Chinese started to become very fearful of the USSR.

The Sino-Soviet Split was fucking stupid, basically.

Like, the Chinese were correct that the USSR was making revisionist changes that would prove detrimental to its long term survival. But the hostile foreign policy that China took towards the USSR was also a huge fucking problem.

They could have easily sided with the USSR in foreign policy matters, and viewing them as an wayward Socialist project, still worth supporting against Imperialist aggression. But they didn’t do that. And in many ways we’re still living with the consequences.

It’s a big part of why modern Chinese foreign policy is so cautious.

I’ll try to answer all 3:

• Sino-Soviet split (Vietnam was aligned with the USSR)
• Sino-Soviet split (Afghanistan was aligned with the USSR)
• (drum roll) yeah it’s Sino-Soviet split too (Angola and Cuba were aligned with the USSR)

1. Vietnam was keeping supplies intended for the Rouge for itself during the vietnam war, kicked out its chinese minority, was making noise on the back then informal China-Vietnam border, sided with the soviets during the split(Vietnam didn’t really have a choice), upheld the claims of South Vietnam on the SCS after unification and invaded Cambodia (Vietnam already knew of the genocides of the Rouge, China didn’t). To China it looked as if they had a growing Vietnamese empire to their south allied to the now hostile USSR to their north. The PRC needed a counter weight. Ultimately China settled staying in a border war with Vietnam until the 80s to fuck them economically, it was shitshow for both sides. Both communist parties have mended ties only recently and the vietnamese people are still pissed.

2. Sino-Soviet-Split.

3. Sino-Soviet-Split