The Sino-Soviet Summit was a four-day event that took place in Beijing from May 15-18, 1989. It was the first formal meeting between a Soviet Communist leader and a Chinese Communist leader since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s. The last Soviet leader to visit China was Nikita Khrushchev in September 1959. The summit was attended by Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader of China, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Both leaders declared that the summit marked the beginning of normalized state-to-state relations between the two countries. The meeting between Gorbachev and then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Zhao Ziyang, was characterized as the "natural restoration" of party-to-party relations.