Sarah Paine

And then during the Chinese Civil War, the Russians tell Mao, oh, stop, Yangzi, you need to take a little breather here, because he wants a divided China, like the divided Germany he has, and then the divided Korea he's going to get.

You want to be surrounded by these little broken states around you if you're a continental power.

And then when Stalin dies and Mao wants to be senior statesman of communism, Khrushchev is appalled by that.

Then Mao is appalled when Khrushchev does de-Stalinization because Mao has his own cult of personality.

And then Khrushchev wants to do peaceful coexistence with the West while Mao is ramping it up in the Cultural Revolution.

So there is no meeting of the minds.

And then all this becomes very public when it hits the propaganda press of the communists of the Sino-Soviet split in 1960.

All right, the Russians have their own gripes about the Chinese, and here's how they go.

The Russians look around at the West and particularly the United States and go, wow, they got bases everywhere.

The British have got bases everywhere.

How come our allies won't give us bases?

I mean, well, if you occupy Eastern Europe, the whole place is a base, but that's a different matter.

So the Russians want the Chinese to let them keep a couple of remaining Tsarist treaty ports, essentially.

and wants to expand them.

And the Chinese say, forget it.

And in fact, after the Korean War, when the Chinese have troops all up in Manchuria, which is where these bases were located, and there's a succession struggle going on because Stalin's just died, the Russians have to return the bases because there's just too much bad stuff happening where they live.

And then what Mao does in 54 and 58,

which just appalls the Russians, are these two Taiwanese strait crises.

What's going on?

Mao is lobbying all kinds of ordinance on these islands that are owned by Taiwan that are very close to the People's Republic's shores.