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.
Lofty phrases with little substance. USSR did not invade capitalist countries to forcibly turn them socialist, it supported existing socialist and decolonial movements.
It requires incredible mental gymnastics to answer the question “why did China join USA to support reactionary jihadists, Pol Pot, and apartheid-aligned anti-communists against genuine socialist movements with broad popular support” with “because socialism must come from the bottom-up through grassroots movements”.
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.
Soviets did not suppress the Eighth Plenum. They only demanded that Poland commits to remaining socialist, staying in the Warsaw Pact, and not expelling Soviet troops stationed in Poland (under condition they are not used to interfere in Poland’s internal affairs).
Plenum went forward with all their proposals. Soviet-aligned members of party leadership were removed and Gomułka, who was previously expelled from the party as a right-nationalist deviationist, was elected leader. Proposed measures to decentralise power and institute worker self-management went through. So your assertion that USSR enforced a rigid model on Poland is markedly false.
Gomułka very soon reversed those changes but those were internal Polish decisions because the party quickly realised it actually needs centralised power for the socialist project to survive - or because they lusted for power, whatever explanation works for you, what matters is there is zero evidence this reversal was forced by Moscow.
Please also remember Mao himself was as ideologically rigid as Stalin. You bring up Yugoslavia but Mao also condemned Tito and Yugoslavian worker self-management as revisionism. He condemned Khrushchev’s reforms as revisionism too - why not let USSR blaze their own path if imposing the Stalin Model from outside is so bad?
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.
This is again misleading, USSR only moved troops into Vietnam after China invaded Vietnam.
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.
Two falsehoods here:
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Khrushchev never made such deal with the US (or provide archival source, documents from this era are declassified and publicly available). Khrushchev withdrew support for Chinese nuclear program because Mao started shelling Taiwan and Khrushchev didn’t want to be dragged into a nuclear war with the USA.
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There was no burning of research and documents. In fact once the cat was out of the bag there was no putting it back. China simply continued their nuclear program without Soviet help.
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.
Exactly the opposite is true. Post-Stalin USSR afforded Soviet Bloc countries greater ideological, political, and economic freedom, expanded its support to non-socialist decolonial movements, and supported the Non-Aligned Movement.
Overall a lot of this hinges on simply assuming that Mao’s paranoia about USSR had merits despite all archival evidence to the contrary.
Mao feared that Khrushchev is starting a capitalist restoration and wants to make a deal with the USA against China, and decided to do it first. However no declassified Soviet or US documents support this.
😂