264 { China’s Quest
situation. Insistence on propagating Mao Zedong Thought by Chinese represen-
tatives and students abroad, as well as by media and propaganda organs of the
PRC, offended many foreign governments and publics. In pursuit of spreading
Mao Zedong Thought, Beijing antagonized perhaps thirty of the fifty countries
with whom the PRC had diplomatic relations in 1966. China’s ties with other
communist-ruled countries suffered grievously. Even China’s sensitive ties with
North Korea deteriorated. Among socialist countries, only Albania-China ties
emerged unscathed from the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Even China’s
ties with the powerful and threatening Soviet Union were greatly and negatively
affected by ideological zealotry. Ties with India became far more tense, pushing
that big Asian neighbor of China into closer alignment with the USSR. Several
diplomatic relations that Beijing had carefully nourished over a decade virtu-
ally collapsed: with Burma, Indonesia, and Cambodia. In terms of its judgment
of foreign revolutionary movements, far greater stress was given to leadership
by Marxist-Leninists, and especially groups that pledged fealty to Mao Zedong
Thought, than to merely nationalist anti-imperialist groups. The importance of
the global propagation of Mao Zedong Thought was laid out nicely by a Renmin
ribao commentary of mid-1967:
The rapid and extensive dissemination of the great, all conquering
thought of Mao Zedong is the most important feature of the excellent
international situation today. The world has entered a new era which has
Mao Zedong’s thought as its great banner. The study and application of
Mao Zedong’s thought has become a mass movement on a global scale,
or a magnitude with far reaching influence never before witnessed in
the history of the development of Marxism-Leninism.^6
The image of a world in revolutionary upheaval led by the Thought of Mao
Zedong helped inspire struggle to revolutionize China. Mao Zedong Thought
was portrayed as an invincible force sweeping the world and moving it ineluc-
tably, inevitably toward the victory of the proletariat and socialism. China’s
revolutionary struggle and the global revolution were linked, proclaimed
Maoists. The fiercer the one struggle became, the sharper the other would
become.Assault on the Conventions of Bourgeois DiplomacyRed Guard attacks on foreign diplomatic facilities and personnel in China
were one dimension of foreign relations during the Cultural Revolution.
Large crowds of demonstrators, typically involving tens of thousands, some-
times hundreds of thousands, and on several occasions millions of people,
would be trucked in to assemble outside a designated foreign compound.
Red Guard marshals typically directed crowd movements and sometimes led