110 { China’s Quest
It lobbied for PRC participation in the negotiations of a peace treaty with
Japan and for that treaty to explicitly cede Taiwan to China. When it became
clear that neither of those efforts would succeed, Nehru decided that India
would not participate in the multilateral peace conference with Japan. India
was a major advocate of inviting the PRC to participate, again against US
urging, in what became the 1954 Geneva Conference. At Bandung, Nehru
secured PRC participation and then assumed the role of introducing Zhou
Enlai to other delegates, arranging a number of private gatherings calculated
to bring Zhou into closer contact with other countries. The United States
fumed at Nehru’s efforts to help the PRC out of the isolation Washington was
trying to impose on it. India’s friendship diplomacy toward the PRC created
major tensions in India-US relations.^40
Several calculations underlay Nehru’s effort to befriend Beijing.^41 Nehru
envisioned a partnership between India and China leading Asia and the
emerging nations down a path of peace and cooperation—in contrast, Nehru
believed, to the path of war and hostility being charted by Washington and
Moscow and their Cold War. Nehru believed that the alignments that consti-
tuted the Cold War would ultimately lead to global nuclear war. The alternate
to that course, Nehru believed, was non-alignment, dialogue, and disarma-
ment. It was India’s destiny to save humanity by leading it away from the
insane path toward arms races, alliances, and nuclear war being charted by
Moscow and Washington. China could become a partner in this effort. As
PRC rulers became more aware of the thinking of other “emerging nations”
of Asia and Africa, China would draw away from close alignment with the
Soviet Union and gravitate toward non-aligned cooperation with India.
Nehru (and Indian nationalism generally) had deep sympathy for China’s
struggle against imperialism. India and China together would lead Asia and
humanity away from the insanity of the Cold War.
Mao Zedong had a vision for the emerging countries that was radically
different from Nehru’s: not non-alignment, disarmament, and peace, but a
united front against imperialism, revolutionary war, and the most powerful
defense possible of the socialist camp against imperialism. Mao would not lay
out this distinctly non-Nehruvian vision until 1959–1963. But when he did, it
would be point by point a refutation of what Mao took to be Nehru’s efforts
to mislead the peoples of the intermediate zone away from the correct course
of armed wars of national liberation. In 1955 at Bandung, that was still several
years in the future.
A second level of logic behind Nehru’s friendship policy toward the PRC
had to do with persuading Beijing not to turn Tibet into a platform for Chinese
military power. The centuries-long relation between Chinese emperors and
Tibet’s ruling monasteries did not entail the permanent stationing of large
Chinese military forces in Tibet. Chinese emperors would occasionally dis-
patch armies to Tibet, for example to repel a Dzungar Mongol invasion in 1719