History

And yet, very very different. Kruschev's liberalization and detante with America was an attempt to join the imperialist club and carve up the world as an ally to the US and ultimately resulted in the absolutely horrible inequality that developed in the final decades of the USSR.

Deng's liberalization and detante with America was an attempt to get the US to fund the development of Chinese productive forces. That worked. It was not an attempt to join the imperialism club, and in fact China became less chauvinistic under Deng than under Mao. That shows correctness. And the resulting economics show continuous improvement of living and working conditions for Chinese workers when, at the same age, the USSR had already started to economically collapse.

Also, the other comments claiming that the USSR might not have collapsed without the split forget that China had almost nothing to offer the USSR at the time of the split. They were not an effective producer of anything. They were deeply impoverished. They were militarily weak. The split hurt China more than it hurt the USSR because it cost China access to technology, energy, military collaboration, etc.

I think the USSR probably would have dragged China down with it as it collapsed under the programming of the counter-revolutionaries. It's not like China didn't try. They were debates and discourse to attempt to analyze and convince the Kruschevites of the incorrectness of the oath they were on. Not only was China right rhetorically, China was right materially, and history has proven this to us.