The Sino-Soviet Conflict

This concluding chapter argues that the fracture proved even more damaging since it took place within the context of an older, larger fracture: the Sino- Soviet schism. The chapter charts the importance of the Chinese revolution as a factor which decisively changed the balance of global forces in favour of socialism. It argues that, therefore, its trajectory could not but affect, decisively, that balance. The chapter traces the evolution of Chinese foreign policy through its various phases right up to the period in which it became a critically important counterweight to the wave of victorious revolutions and the most important single countervailing factor in the global correlation of forces that had evolved in the 1970s in favour of socialism.