230 { China’s Quest
the mantle of legitimate heir, and for China glory as the red bastion of world
revolution. The Marxist grail would move from Moscow to Beijing.
Establishing Mao Zedong as the fifth deity in the Marxist-Leninist pan-
theon (after Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin) by demonstrating his un-
flinching adherence to revolutionary war and the “correctness” of his thought
via successes in Southeast Asia was probably a strong motivation from Mao’s
standpoint. Success in expanding the realm of socialism was an important
requirement for Marxist-Leninist sainthood, at least since Lenin. As the CCP
explained in its 1956 polemic on the Stalin question, Stalin had proved his
heirship to Lenin by, inter alia, expanding the socialist sphere in Eastern
Europe and Korea and helping the CCP gain power in China. Because of the
proximity of Southeast Asia to revolutionary China, and because of various
cultural and historical factors, that region made the most sense as an arena
in which China could manifest its “proletarian internationalism.” East Africa
was another area of Chinese revolutionary activism, but saw nothing on the
scale of Southeast Asia.
Mao was, of course, concerned with the security of the PRC. He saw suc-
cessful wars of national liberation as a way of driving the United States out
of Southeast Asia, and believed that an American exit would strengthen PRC
security. But the means they chose to achieve that was the “revolutionary
transformation” of the Southeast Asian nations. Mao’s objectives were, in
part, realist: to make revolutionary China more secure from US pressure,
threat, or attack. But another objective was to create a revolutionary China
in a revolutionary world—or at least those portions of the world China could
significantly influence. The fact that Indonesia and Malaya sat astride the
sea lines of communication between East Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Europe
would further enhance that shift.
Calculations of the correlation of forces between the revolutionary camp
and the imperialist camp also factored into Mao’s push for socialist revolu-
tion in Southeast Asia. If Southeast Asia joined the socialist camp, the global
correlation of forces would shift even more decisively against US imperi-
alism. Mao at the 1957 Moscow conference had enumerated the factors al-
ready accomplishing that shift. Now, if under CCP tutelage the vast area of
Southeast Asia could be shifted to the revolutionary side of the global bal-
ance, that balance would further favor the revolutionary, progressive camp.
China’s embrace of revolutionary activism in Southeast Asia was in line with
the division of labor in the world revolutionary process worked out by Stalin
and Liu Shaoqi in July 1949.
Finally, the CCP’s revolutionary quest also had deep roots in China’s
domestic politics. Mao’s revolutionary activism in Southeast Asia par-
alleled his intensified struggle against hidden revisionists within the
CCP—high-ranking leaders who favored retreat from class struggle and
emphasis, instead, on improving standards of living. Mao calculated that a