Aligned Rivalries: The Sino-Soviet Split in the Periphery

In 1967, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) split in two and within two years a second Communist Party (CPP) was founded. The split in the Philippine party followed the lines of the raging conflict in world Communism between the Soviet Union and China. At the same time it expressed sharpening tensions within the Philippine elite in a period of social upheaval. The pro-Moscow PKP supported Ferdinand Marcos and assisted in his imposition of dictatorship; the pro-Beijing CPP allied with Marcos' ruling class rival, Benigno Aquino Jr.

Aligned Rivalries examines how the context of global social upheaval in the 1960s both sharpened the tensions between the erstwhile comrades in the Soviet Union and China and accelerated the scramble for dictatorship in ruling circles in the Philippines, bringing about an alignment of rivalries between Marcos and Moscow on the one hand, and Aquino and Beijing on the other. Around the world, and throughout the global south in particular, parties split in a similar fashion, the ideological struggle within the Communist bloc finding congruent alignment with rival sets of national social interests. The aligned ruptures were an outcome of a shared set of global class pressures rather than the product of external machinations or domestic disputes.

In investigating the complex mechanisms of the Sino-Soviet split in the Philippines, Aligned Rivalries unearths a dynamic network of horizontal interconnections across the global south that ran through Jakarta and Hiroshima, Havana and Santiago. This network not only responded to developments in Moscow and Beijing, it also shaped them. The end result of my research is a study of the Sino-Soviet split from the periphery.