New light on the Sino-Soviet alliance: Chinese and American perspectives

With the partial opening of the documentary record in the United States and a willingness on the part of Chinese officials and researchers to give a more considered assessment of their country’s relationship with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the value of the Sino-Soviet alliance to Beijing can now be better determined. Recent Chinese analysis demonstrates that the Beijing leadership believed that it derived security, technological, and economic benefit from the alliance until 1958–59. American records show that U.S. administrations always perceived the alliance as conditional and circumscribed but nevertheless operative if, as a result of warfare, the overthrow of the Chinese Communist government appeared possible.