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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
This article is an effort to set forth certain major similarities and differences between the societies of the Soviet Union and Communist China as of January 1955.
It is evident that the Soviet Union and Communist China have many characteristics in common. They stem mainly from parallel or identical concepts of power and its purposes, internal and external, accepted by the respective top leadership groups. These concepts have been translated into similar methods of societal organization, imposed value standards, and lines of day-to-day policy at home and abroad. Differences between the two countries arise from the nature of the economies controlled by Moscow and Peking; from the length of time the Communist regimes have been established; from certain characteristics of each top leadership group; from elements in the Russian and Chinese cultures that even modern totalitarianism has not wholly erased; and from problems presented by the goal of external expansion that the Soviet Union and Communist China share.
1 should perhaps be emphasized that this article is not primarily concerned with Sino-Soviet relations, a subject that has been fully dealt with in Rostow, W. W., Hatch, R. W., Kierman, F. A. Jr, and Eckstein, A., The Prospects for Communist China, New York, 1954Google Scholar, Part 4.
2 Cf. Rostow, et al.; op.cit., notably Part 6.
3 Sumner, B. H., A Short History of Russia, New York, 1949, p. 84.Google Scholar
