Introduction

As the twentieth century came to its close, China, which in 1900 had been one of the extra-European empires that had been brought to its knees by the might of the West, was emerging as a nascent superpower.

People's Republic of China (PRC)

The official name of communist or mainland China. The PRC came into existence in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong.

The ability of China to play an important part in international politics is not, however, a new development, for during the period of the Cold War the PRC took on a number of roles that influenced the course of the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the People's Republic of China was in its early years a key ally of the Soviet Union. Over time it developed into the world's leading revolutionary state, threatening

detente

A term meaning the reduction of tensions between states. It is often used to refer to the superpower diplomacy that took place between the inauguration of Richard Nixon as the American president in 1969 and the Senate's refusal to ratify SALT II in 1980.

Guomindang (GMD)

The Chinese Nationalist party founded in 1913 by Sun Yatsen. Under the control of Jiang Jieshi, it came to power in China in 1928 and initiated a modernization programme before leading the country into war against Japan in 1937. It lost control over mainland China in 1949 as a result of the communist victory in the civil war. From 1949 it controlled Taiwan, overseeing the island's ‘economic miracle', until its electoral defeat in 2000.

not just the interests of the Western liberal democracies and their clients but also Moscow’s claim to primacy within the socialist bloc. As China was significantly weaker than either of the two superpowers, this was a dangerous position to adopt for too long and finally, after deciding that Russia posed a greater danger than the United States, it leaned towards the latter, helping to create the conditions that brought about detente in the 1970s.

To understand the positions the PRC adopted and the motives behind its dramatic shifts in policy, it is important to look at a number of themes in Chinese policy-making and how they influenced the development of its diplomacy. Key factors here are the interplay between domestic events and foreign policy, the legacy of China’s ‘one hundred years of national humiliation’ as a semi-colonized country and, perhaps most significant in Mao’s period, the role of ideology in the survival and furthering of the revolution.