Quest to Transform Southeast Asia } 201
until the early 1960s that CCP revolutionary activism went into high gear.
Starting in 1962, as Mao was intensifying the struggle against domestic and
international revisionism, the CCP undertook a bold and geographically
wide-ranging effort to encourage and support communist-led insurgencies
across Southeast Asia. This effort meshed with the CCP’s rejection of the
CPSU’s embrace of peaceful coexistence and was, in effect, an attempt to put
into practice the correct line prescribed by Mao for the international com-
munist movement.
Wang Jiaxiang’s February 1962 proposal of a return to a Bandung-era
approach to foreign policy was discussed in the previous chapter. The “one
reduction” component of Wang’s proposal entailed reduction of support for
foreign insurgencies. Wang was head of the ILD and, as such, responsible for
contact with foreign revolutionary movements and communist parties. As
shown in a previous chapter, Wang’s proposal to reduce support for foreign
wars of national liberation was decisively rejected by Mao. The CCP should
increase, not decrease, support for wars of national liberation in the inter-
mediate zone, Mao insisted. The strategy underlying this CCP revolution-
ary activism was outlined by Mao in talks with VWP Secretary General Le
Duan in August 1964, as conveyed to and reported by Chin Peng. Revolution
would soon sweep across Southeast Asia, Mao told Le Duan. Revolutionary
victories would occur one after another in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand,
and Malaysia.^4
The CCP and Hanoi’s War to “Liberate” South Vietnam
The VWP insurgency in South Vietnam constituted the central element
of the CCP’s Southeast Asian revolutionary offensive. In January 1959, the
VWP determined that growing revolutionary activity in the South, com-
bined with repression of the revolutionary forces by the US-supported Saigon
government, required initiation of armed struggle to overthrow the Saigon
regime.^5 In line with this decision, personnel and materials were infiltrated
south along trails newly carved in the mountains and jungles of eastern and
southern Laos and eastern Cambodia. VWP efforts met with substantial suc-
cess; insurgency grew rapidly in South Vietnam. Unfortunately for Hanoi,
the Kennedy administration (inaugurated in January 1961) responded by
sending in ever more US military advisors to support the increasingly embat-
tled Saigon government. Under these circumstances, Hanoi sought Chinese
support. In June 1961, DRV Premier Pham Van Dong visited Beijing for talks
with Chinese leaders. Mao promised support for the VWP’s war to take over
South Vietnam.^6
CCP leaders urged the VWP to follow the CCP’s successful path of pro-
tracted guerrilla war, avoiding large-unit battles with the enemy for a long