The Beginning of Friendship

This chapter deals with the beginning of the friendship between China and Albania. Enver Hoxha was one of the first leaders to congratulate Mao Zedong on the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Relations between the two countries deepened significantly after Hoxha’s visit to Beijing in 1956. This visit marked Albania’s decisive turn toward China and the beginning of its distance from the USSR. The chapter argues that the Albanian-Chinese rapprochement was shaped by ideological affinity, power, and strategic interests. Enver Hoxha did not agree with Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1956). Albania began to consider China, rather than the USSR, as an alternative center of socialist legitimacy and political, economic, and military support. For Beijing, support for Albania was a form of resistance to Soviet ideological hegemony. This chapter also describes the details of the Bucharest Conference (June 1960) and the Moscow Conference (November 1960), in which the conflict between China and Albania, on the one hand, and the USSR, on the other, took final shape.