The Communist Party of China was born as a project of the Comintern. In the summer of 1921, thirteen delegates gathered at the first congress in Shanghai; organizational and financial assistance was provided by emissaries from Moscow - Grigory Voitinsky and the Dutchman Hendrikus Sneevliet (Maring). At that time, a model was established: Chinese communists acted according to a strategy that was approved thousands of miles away from China.

This also led them to their first disaster. At the insistence of the Comintern, the CPC entered into an alliance with the Kuomintang (nationalists) in 1923; Mikhail Borodin and Vasily Blucher arrived in Canton to help create the military academy in Whampoa. In April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek crushed the communist underground in Shanghai, and the alliance collapsed. Moscow's influence persisted through the '28 Bolsheviks' led by Wang Ming, but after the meeting in Zunyi (1935), the party was led by Mao Zedong, who owed less to the Comintern than others.

Stalin remained a pragmatist: in August 1945, he signed a treaty with Chiang Kai-shek's government. However, the trophy Japanese weapons transferred to the CPC in Manchuria greatly helped them win the civil war.

The peak of closeness occurred in the 1950s. The February 1950 treaty on friendship, alliance, and mutual assistance, loans, 156 industrial projects, thousands of Soviet engineers, and a blueprint of the Soviet five-year plan turned China into an industrial power modeled after Moscow.

But the rift quickly emerged: the 20th Congress and de-Stalinization of 1956, the dispute over peaceful coexistence, Khrushchev's refusal to transfer nuclear technologies in 1959, the withdrawal of specialists in 1960, and finally the clashes at Damansky in 1969. The rupture in relations was exploited by the USA, which began cooperation with China, ultimately transforming it into a superpower. Normalization of relations with the USSR only occurred in May 1989, with Gorbachev's visit to Beijing - just weeks before Tiananmen.