Revolutionary China and the Third World
At the same time as the Sino-Soviet alliance collapsed, the PRC once again moved towards a more assertive and revolutionary foreign policy directed at winning over adherents in Asia and Africa.
Ever since the creation of the PRC Mao had recognized that China, which was itself a relatively underdeveloped Asian country, could play a leadership role in the Third World and encourage the states of Asia and Africa in their struggle against imperialism. Its first bid to assume such an influential position came in April 1955 when it attended the Bandung Conference of Asian and African states. At this stage it posed as a respectable state to the extent that it developed a close relationship with neutralist India and renounced its claim to authority over the overseas Chinese population in South-East Asia. However, from the time of the Great Leap and the border clashes with India over Tibet in 1959, the PRC moved towards a more divisive policy towards the Third World. This more confrontational stance was marked by denunciations of the new concept of non-alignment espoused by Nehru and Tito, and support for the more overtly anti-imperialist line taken by President Sukarno of Indonesia.From 1963 anti-imperialism and support for the newly independent revolutionary states and national liberation movements became the centrepiece of Chinese diplomacy. Leaders such as Zhou Enlai and Peng Zhen engaged in extensive tours of Asia and Africa, attempting among other things to win support for a second Asian-African conference to be held at Algiers that would steal the
Bandung Afro-Asian Conference
The conference of Asian and African states held in Bandung in Indonesia in 1955. Commonly seen as the first move towards the establishment of a Third World lobby in international politics.
overseas Chinese
The descendants of the Chinese who immigrated to South-East Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
They have tended to act as a merchant class and as such have stirred up a good deal of resentment among the indigenous people who envy their wealth and doubt their loyalty to their adopted countries.non-alignment
A state policy of avoiding involvement in ‘Great Power conflicts’, most notably the Cold War. It was first espoused by India on its becoming independent in 1947.
see Chapter 13
Non-Aligned Movement
The organization founded in 1961 by a number of neutral states which called for a lowering of Cold War tensions and for greater attention to be paid to underdevelopment and to the eradication of imperialism.
see Chapter 12
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)
The official name of communist Vietnam; the DRV was initially proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh in 1945. Between 1954 and 1975 it comprised only the northern part of Vietnam (North Vietnam).
limelight from the Non-Aligned Movement. In addition a Beijing-Jakarta axis was developed with Indonesia and its communist party, the PKI, and close relations were established with Pakistan on the basis of mutual hostility towards India. Most significant of all was that the PRC became the key foreign supporter of the campaign by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to unify Vietnam under communist rule. Thus, freed from what it considered to be the shackles of its alliance with the Soviet Union, the PRC became a crusader for revolution and threatened to export its ideology to the Third World, to the detriment of both Washington and Moscow. In this sense the revolutionary diplomacy espoused by the PRC provided an essential backdrop to the escalation of the American commitment to the Vietnam War, for Chinese ambitions suggested that the domino theory could become a reality.
The PRC's ability to provide an effective challenge to the international order was, however, compromised by two factors. The first was that the PRC had very little of substance to offer its potential clients apart from rhetoric.
China could, after all, not provide much in the way of economic assistance or advanced military hardware. Even in Vietnam the PRC found itself outbid technologically once American air attacks began on the DRV, for Hanoi quickly turned to the Soviet Union in the recognition that only the latter could provide the air defence equipment that was urgently needed. Moreover, the PRC's ability to create its own bloc was limited by the fact that it could not come to the aid of its clients if they were challenged by internal or external enemies for it lacked the capability to project its power. For example, the PRC may have exploded its first atomic bomb in October 1964 but it lacked an adequate delivery system. Its relative weakness was illustrated all too graphically by its inability to influence the outcome of the Indo-Pakistan War of September 1965, and its powerlessness when, in October, the Indonesian army turned on the PKI and began to marginalize Sukarno. China's bark was therefore considerably worse than its bite, and this made it a poor and increasingly unappealing patron.Gang of Four
The radical group centred upon Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, that helped to initiate and perpetuate the Cultural Revolution. They were purged in 1976 following Mao's death, put on trial for treason and later executed.
The second factor which led to the curtailment of the diplomatic offensive was that by 1965-66 Mao's attention had turned to domestic issues, for by this time he had become convinced that the cancer of revisionism had infected his own party. One of his main concerns was that the post-Leap retrenchment policies pursued by Liu and Deng, which included a return to peasants cultivating their private plots, had gone too far and were tantamount to pursuing the ‘capitalist road' to socialism. He also contended that the CCP cadres were turning into a new ruling class, and that this transformation promised a continuation of class inequality rather than the egalitarian society that the revolution had been intended to achieve.
The obvious solution to this threat to his life's work was to mobilize the people to make revolution against the party. At first Mao struggled to turn his ideas into practice, for he had lost influence in the early 1960s. However, by 1965 he was able to form a coalition that supported his new line. His supporters included the People's Liberation Army (PLA) under the control of the minister of defence, Lin Biao, and the ultra-left group centred on what retrospectively has been referred to as the Gang of Four, of which his wife, Jiang Qing, was the key member. In addition, Mao was able to rely on the tacit support of Premier Zhou Enlai, who was under attack from the Liu/Deng camp for the PRC's failures in foreign policy.The Cultural Revolution began in earnest in the summer of 1966 when Mao encouraged students to criticize the running of universities and in particular their elitist admissions and examination policies. These students quickly formed themselves into the Red Guards, the foot soldiers of Mao's campaign, and steadily expanded their range of targets to attack former landlords and capitalists and then finally party officials themselves. At the same time ultra-left workers' groups emerged which took the struggle into the factories. The Cultural Revolution swept away the ‘capitalist roaders', Deng being forced into internal exile while Liu died in custody in 1969, but its effects did not end there, for once Mao unleashed the revolutionary spirit it proved very difficult to control. Within months the Red Guards and workers' groups split into factions that fought between and among themselves. In 1967 cities such as Guangzhou and Wuhan were thrown into chaos and the whole country teetered on the brink of anarchy.
The effect on the PRC's foreign relations was that the country began to cut itself off from the outside world. Ambassadors were called back to Beijing for re-education and diplomatic relations were left in suspension. The only manifestations of China's foreign policy agenda were the pronouncements of support for like-minded communist parties, such as those in Burma, Cambodia and Albania, and the vitriolic polemics unleashed against both capitalism and the ‘phoney communism' of the Soviet Union.
Its retreat from the active revolutionary diplomacy of the mid-1960s suggests that, during the most intense revolutionary period in its history, China was more of a danger to itself than it was to the outside world. Indeed, it may be that China's retreat into the Cultural Revolution to a degree eased American security concerns in South-East Asia, and by doing so made the de-escalation of the Vietnam War possible.However, not all of China's foes took comfort from its latest change of direction. To the Soviet Union, China's revolutionary folly showed it to be a dangerous and distinctly unstable neighbour. Following the ousting of Khrushchev by Aleksei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev in October 1964, the new Soviet leadership, after its initial conciliatory overtures had been rejected, decided to take a tough line against the PRC, and began strengthening massively its forces on the border and targeting nuclear weapons against its former ally. The Cultural Revolution only exacerbated this tendency. The sharp growth of Soviet hostility had in turn two major effects on the PRC. The first was that it contributed to Mao's decision to abandon the Red Guard stage of the Cultural Revolution. In particular, Mao was concerned when in August 1968 the Soviet Union used the Red Army to crush the ‘Prague Spring' in Czechoslovakia and issued the Brezhnev Doctrine, which claimed that the USSR had the right to intervene in other countries in order to put down deviations from Soviet-style communism. This clearly could be construed as a threat to the PRC, and seems to have influenced the decision to use the PLA to bring the Red Guards under control. The second effect was that, in the light of a number of serious clashes on the Sino-Soviet border, Mao began to realize that China's international isolation was endangering its security, and that it might be necessary to deter Russia from attacking by developing relations with the United States. Thus, in another irony, by causing a worsening of Sino-Soviet relations, the Cultural Revolution encouraged Mao to tone down the struggle against Western imperialism.
Cultural Revolution
The movement initiated by Mao in 1966 to rid the CCP of ‘revisionists' whom he accused of seeking to introduce the type of state capitalism that existed in the Soviet Union. The Cultural Revolution was at its height between 1966 and 1969, but did not end officially until Mao's death in 1976.
Red Guards
The students and workers who acted as the foot soldiers of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-69.
Prague Spring
A brief period of liberal reforms attempted by the government of Alexander Dubcek in 1968. The period ended with the invasion by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military forces.
Brezhnev Doctrine
The ‘doctrine' expounded by Leonid Brezhnev in November 1968 affirming the right of the Soviet Union to intervene in the affairs of communist countries in order to protect communism.
see Chapter 11