Soviet union : Relations with China nd others asians nations

The Soviet Union immediately recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that was established under Communist leader Mao Zedong in 1949, allied itself with it, and backed its demand to be seated in the UN in place of the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China (ROC), which was forced to relocate to Taiwan. Both the USSR and the PRC supported North Korea in the Korean War (1950-1953). The USSR extended technical and financial aid to China in the 1950s, and trade between the two countries increased.

Ties between the two largest Communist countries deteriorated after 1960. On the surface was an ideological disagreement over the interpretation of Marxism, especially with regard to revolutions in the developing countries. Underneath was the rivalry of two former empires, their leaders intensely nationalistic and eager for leadership of the rest of the Communist world. The jealousy surfaced in quarrels over their long common border and in the Soviet refusal to assist the Chinese in developing their nuclear technology. Clashes of border guards along the Amur and Ussuri rivers in 1969 raised the specter of war. Despite Soviet efforts to calm relations after Mao’s death in 1976, Soviet-Chinese rivalry continued unabated, as China encouraged the East European states to seek greater autonomy and turned to the West for military and economic aid.

The USSR supported the Communist forces of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam after World War II and signed an agreement of cooperation with Ho in 1950. In 1954 the USSR participated in the Geneva Accords that divided the country into North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and continued to support the Communist north, headed by Ho, when a struggle broke out between Communist forces seeking to reunite the country and U.S.-backed anti-Communists. As the Vietnam War (1959-1975) worsened during the 1960s, the Soviets staunchly supported North Vietnam and its guerrilla allies in the south. After the North Vietnamese victory in 1975, the Soviet Union supported a reunited Vietnam (Socialist Republic of Vietnam) in its conflict with China. Soviet relations with other Asian countries were both conciliatory and aggressive. Premier Kosygin rendered an outstanding service to world peace in 1966 by mediating a new phase of the dispute between India and Pakistan over the territory of Jammu and Kashm?r.

In the 1971 war between India and Pakistan that ended with the formation of the state of Bangladesh, the Soviet Union supported victorious India, while both China and the United States sided with Pakistan. With Japan, a peace treaty ending World War II was never signed because of the Soviet Union’s refusal to return several small islands in the Kuril chain it had acquired in 1945. In December 1979 the Soviet Union sent a large military force across the border into Afghanistan in an attempt to shore up a faltering Marxist government there. Amid condemnation from most of the rest of the world, Soviet troops continued to fight Afghan nationalist resistance and occupy the country. The war eventually cost about 15,000 Soviet lives and the lives of between 700,000 and 1.3 million Afghans before the Soviet withdrawal in the late 1980s. Encarta

Picture of Soviet Union.