From Honeymoon to Conflict: Reassessing the Changing Relationship between the Soviet Union and China after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Khrushchev’s secret speech of February 1956 led to profound changes not only within the world communist movement, but also in the relations between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Communist Party of China (CCP). The three panel papers provide insights into the changes that occurred from the honeymoon period until the outbreak of open conflict between the two parties. Meng Li’s paper describes the reactions of Chinese students studying in the Soviet Union to the criticisms made by their Soviet professors and classmates about the Great Leap Forward. Her study, based on interviews with former students, shows that even before the conflict erupted at top party levels, clashes over policy differences, perhaps motivated by in part by Chinese nationalism, were already taking place at lower levels as the honeymoon period between the two countries was coming to an end. Miin-Ling Yu’s fascinating study of the Soviet film The Fate of a Man (1959) follows the changing views of the film in China, first being praised by the CCP as an important expression of humanism and then being condemned by the party as representing “bourgeois humanism” and “revisionism.” Hua-yu Li’s paper examines how Mao first stood by Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin’s “intensification of class struggle as socialism advances” as the basis for Stalin’s mass repressions between 1935 and 1938, but then reinstated these same Stalinist ideas after the Lunshan Conference in 1959 and applied them to China until the end of his life.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Hua-yu Li, Oregon State University

Chair

• Thomas P. Bernstein, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• The Reaction of Chinese Students in the USSR to the Great Leap Forward - Meng Li, University of Chicago

• Humanism or Revisionism: The Role of The Fate of a Man in Sino-Soviet Relations - Miin-Ling Yu, Academia Sinica

• Mao and Stalin’s Class Struggle under Socialism - Hua-yu Li, Oregon State University

Discussant

• Thomas P. Bernstein, Columbia University