ABSTRACT
On February 14, 1950, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) signed a friendship and alliance treaty which provided New China with economic aid and instant military security. It formally went into force on April 11 and was supposed to last for thirty years. Ten years later, in early February 1960, the unnecessarily ideological and provocative speech of the Chinese observer delegate Kang Sheng to the Consultative Meeting of the Warsaw Pact Political Committee triggered an éclat, in which the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev insulted his Chinese counterpart, Mao Zedong.1 After another nine years, in early March 1969, the two sides went to war over their un-demarcated border. Within one more decade, in February 1979, Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, visited the United States after the two sides had formally established diplomatic relations in the wake of the Soviet-Vietnamese alliance. And ten years later, in May 1989, the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing in search of normalization.
