The Bandung Era } 105
agreement reached in the US-PRC ambassadorial talks. All told, 136 meet-
ings would be held between 1955 and 1970. Those talks would provide an
important venue for reaching mutual understandings during the Vietnam
War in 1965–1967, but the breakthrough that Beijing hoped for in 1955
did not come until 1971, and then it would occur outside the venue of the
ambassadorial talks.
The Bandung Conference: Reaching Out to the Third World
The world was in the midst of a profound upheaval in the late 1940s and early
1950s. The vast, globe-spanning empires of the European powers (Britain,
France, and the Netherlands) that had dominated politics over the previous
centuries were collapsing. In regions of Asia and Africa previously ruled from
distant European capitals, new independent nations were emerging. Most of
these “new emerging nations,” as they were then called, were not communist.
Only a few were: North Korea, North Vietnam, and China. The rest were
ruled by local nationalists embracing various blends of nationalism, social-
ism, liberalism, and anti-imperialism, and with varying attitudes toward the
institutional arrangements bequeathed by former colonial rulers. The two
major powers that had long opposed European colonialism—the USSR and
the United States of America—were both keenly interested in this process
of decolonization, and both were attempting to direct the evolution of these
“emerging countries” along lines of development comporting with their re-
spective ideologies and national interests.
Stalin’s approach to these new states had been to reject them as “bourgeois
nationalist” devices cooked up by the colonialist powers to perpetuate political
domination and economic exploitation. These new states were, from Stalin’s
perspective, a trick by the Western powers to deceive the oppressed classes.
These bogus “bourgeois nationalist” regimes needed to be overthrown via rev-
olution led by a proletariat vanguard (i.e., by a proper communist party), and
directed down the path of dictatorship of the proletariat, social revolution, and
socialism. Only this, Stalin believed, could truly liberate these still-enslaved
emerging nations. As long as Stalin lived, this was the line of the international
communist movement. This approach made the noncommunist rulers of many
of the newly independent countries deeply apprehensive of ties with the USSR
and the PRC. National political institutions in many of the new countries were
weak, and the communist vision was often attractive to local intellectuals.
In a number of new states, there were significant communist movements or
uprisings—in the Philippines, India, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
Stalin’s militant line combined with local communist activities to facilitate
US efforts to rally the new emerging countries to a collective effort to contain
communism at the boundaries of the existing Sino-Soviet camp.