It could be more or less accurate. By the time Nixon visited China the Soviet/China split had become central to Chinese thought, which had generated the bizarre "Theory of the Three Worlds," making the USSR the main enemy. China has stood up, Mao declared from the pdoum at the inaugurationof the PRC. And that remained central.
But Mao was a bit complicated. The three-World's _theory_ violated what had been original in Mao's Thought during the Civil War: the distinction between "theory" (unversal during a given epoch) and _thought_, focused on the conditions within a particular nation. But somewhat later, a physicist from the University of Chicago visited China, had an audience with Mao, and Mao asked him if u.s. scientists made that distinction!
(Incidentally, Mao's conception of contradiction & dialectics probably owed as much (or more) to the Chinese conception of Ying and Yang as it owed to Marx!)
But it is idiotic to hold the Russian and the Chinese Revolutons to some abstract concept of what a "real" socialist revolution would be. Of course they weren't socialist revolutions but they were influenced by socialist thought and they were the only kind of revolutions pssible in those nations under the given conditions. So far no nation has industrialized without immense human suffering, much of it theoretically avoidable but probably none of it avoidable in practice. Milton said, tyranny must be though to tyrans no excuse. The criminal conspiracy which ruled the U.S. from the beginning through the Civil War was one of the most brutal regimes in history. Could it have been avoided? Hah!
And think of the horrors British industrialization inflicted not only on the English workking class but the Irish, the Indians. the Chinese (Opium wars). Even Stalin did not quite match that.
Carrol