WI Ceausescu remained a moderate instead of becoming a hardliner?

As hard as it is to believe after his rule, Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's second* most infamous ruler, was actually rather moderate during his early rule. Romania underwent a period of cultural and economic liberalization in the second half of the 1960s, Western products were flowing into the country (Pepsi even had a factory in Constanta!), and writers, artists, and professors saw censorship lessen. All that changed after Ceausescu visited China and North Korea in 1971 and published his July Theses. Inspired by Mao Zedong and Kim il-Sung, he took Romania in a far more hardline direction afterwards, cracking down on dissidents, instituting a cult of personality, and initiating a mini-"cultural revolution" of sorts. Romania paid dearly for the resulting two decades of pseudo-Maoism on the part of Ceausescu.

* (Because there's a reason why it's not called the Nicolae Ceausescu Award for Excellence in the Field of Posting Elaborate Tortures, Uncivilized Acts Against Humanity, and Not Knowing the Meaning of the Words “Cruel and Unusual”.)

But what if Ceausescu hadn't made that trip? Or what if he had, but came away repulsed by or indifferent to what he had seen? What if Romania and Ceausescu continued on the moderate track that they were going down between 1965 and 1971?
 
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He could have become a more organised Tito. He was seen by Cyrus vance no less as a communist firmly committed to anti Sovietsm, and therefore a force for moderation
 
But what if Ceausescu hadn't made that trip? Or what if he had, but came away repulsed by or indifferent to what he had seen?
The man was a true dyed-in-the-wool hardliner. He silenced the internal Party opposition (who had supported Gheorghe Apostol as General Secretary - Ceauşescu's original position in the short-lived triumvirate immediately following Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej's death) by having their main agent, President of the Council of State Chivu Stoica, suffer a Communist suicide (hunting rifle bullet to the side of the head); the others soon relented and accepted being sidetracked into symbolic functions (it truly was a case of cake or Death).

And he would've turned National-Communist anyway. Dej (pronounced 'Dej', not 'Dey') had already shown his willingness to National-ise several aspects of Romanian Communism immediately following Stalin's death (in no small part due to personal animosity between Dej, a staunch Stalinist, and Khruschev, a Moderate). The Nationalist stance under Dej culminated in Romania's stark rebuttal, in 1964, of the Valev Plan for the COMECON (which would've had Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine become the COMECON's - or at least the Western parts of it - collective larder) opting instead for industrialisation (and causing the plan to be eventually ignored).
 
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I can see attempts of the Armenia/Yugoslavia route with the right triggers but the problem is proximity and it stands in between the USSR and hardline Bulgaria.

It would take something dramatic to shift Romania out of the Warsaw Pact, like a full-on Sino-Soviet War.
 
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