Yes. But the Soviet Union also gave China massive support. They sent advisors and gave equipment from top to bottom. The fact is, China got their nuclear bomb with help from the USSR, and even their launcher program, got a head start with technical assistance from the USSR like getting the technical specifications and copies of the R-1 rocket. The Tu-16 was also transferred. Stalin gave Manchuria back to Mao, when it was firmly in Soviet control then. He even gave back territory which used to be part of the Russian Empire at one point. I could continue with more examples like this.
I think China is probably the country which got the most technical assistance from the USSR. None of the other countries, even those in the Warsaw Pact, got assistance as pervasive as China did. To a large degree they did use this assistance, otherwise how could a formerly ruined country build tanks and fighter jets so quickly, but a lot of it was wasted or ignored.
North Korea and Cuba had vibrant economies for the first two decades. But once the Soviets pulled some of the support out they started to collapse. Both countries are simply not large enough to have a proper self-reliant internal economy while the Soviet Union and China could. India was always a basket case I think.
Even as late as 1962 the Soviet Union refused to supply nuclear weapons to India against China when they were having the Indo-China war.
I noticed that you have a clear pro-Russia bias, which in itself is OK, as long as it is based on facts and with the proper context.
Yes, Soviet Union was the biggest supporter of China's early industrialization drive right after the founding of PRC. The well-known 156 large industrial projects that SU helped China build laid the foundation of China's heavy and defense industries. Soviet Union also provided China with an experimental nuclear reactor for China to do research in the '50s, which definitely helped China get started its own nuclear weapon program. But No, the SU did not provide China with nuclear weapons, much of the credit goes to the Chinese.
But it was not free lunch for China from the Soviet Union; most of the aid and concessions from SU were hard earned and well deserved.
Stalin did not give Manchuria back to Mao. That is simply untrue. The communists were undoubtedly benefited from the presence of the Red Army in Manchuria right after the WW2. But the Russians could not blatantly help the communists due to the treaty with the nationalist ROC. In fact, the Nationalist Army had defeated the communist troops, occupied majority of the cities and territories in Manchuria and drove the communist troops way up to northern Manchuria in the early days of the civil war. Mao won back some key concessions to the SU when he was visiting Moscow negotiating the Soviet Union-China alliance treaty in 1950 after some hard bargains. The SU gave up all their privileges in Manchuria in the '50s when the two countries were in honeymoon.
The Soviet Union badly needed strong allies back then when facing the western containment led by the US. The Cold War was clearly underway after the 1948 West Berlin crisis.
It was Korean War that had changed Stalin's opinion of PRC and the CCP. The performance of PLA and PRC in general during the Korean War greatly exceeded the expectation of Stalin and indeed, that of the rest of the world. By going into the Korean War resolutely even without the promised air support from SU Air Force initially and still performed impressively against the strongest military in the world, PLA demonstrated its capability and PRC made its choice of alliance abundantly clear. SU then threw its support to PRC almost without reservation during and immediately after the war. Khrushchev continued that policy. In fact, he needed China's support and solidarity more due to both external and internal reasons.
But PRC was not the biggest beneficiary of SU assistance, that honor went to India. India had received more Soviet assistance than China had by 1960. And the economic and defense assistance continued long after the breakup of SU and PRC.
China clearly made most of the aid it got from the SU among all the recipients, which magnified the apparent benefits. But you can't mix up the competence and credit. The same story repeated after Russia and China rapprochement post the breakup of the Soviet Union.
As I stated last year in the Ladakh thread (IIRC), China benefited greatly in its respective relationship with SU/Russia and the US when their relationships were close. But China was hardly the one-sided beneficiary of the relationships: Russia needed China to stand up to the West and the US China to contain the SU. China was not the only countries benefiting from allying with a superpower. It's just that China's competency and capability made her a clear winner.
