Rapprochement with the United States } 305
1971, the People’s Republic of China assumed China’s seat in both the United
National General Assembly and the Security Council.
China was not passive in this process; it worked actively to expand its dip-
lomatic ties.^31 Beijing sent and welcomed 290 foreign delegations from eighty
countries in the one year of 1971. These delegations were honored with ban-
quets, thereby earning the name “banquet diplomacy,” and were otherwise
instructed about China’s desire to expand ties. China also resumed economic
assistance, allocating $700 million in 1970 alone. This was a huge amount
for a country as poor as China. Beijing’s hospitality and largess exploited the
advantageous conditions created by the shift in US policy. The need for expe-
rienced diplomatic cadres to take part in these efforts coincided with the fall
of Lin Biao in September 1971. Both halves of that equation facilitated Zhou
Enlai’s release of many cadres from the rural cadre schools where they had
been languishing since 1968 or so.
The Fallout of China’s Rapprochement with the United States:
Alienation of Albania
Ironically, while entering the United Nations with Albanian sponsorship,
China’s special, comradely relation with Albania was collapsing as a result of
Beijing’s rapprochement with the United States. This episode is worth explor-
ing at some length, since from 1963 until 1971 the Sino-Albanian entente was
a core part of Beijing’s quest for world revolution, and the collapse of that
entente was an interesting consequence of Beijing’s embrace of the United
States. While tensions existed in China’s relations with North Vietnam and
North Korea over those counties’ insistence on balancing between Beijing
and Moscow, no such ambiguity existed in Sino-Albanian relations. Tirana
(Albania’s capital) was completely in the CCP’s camp as the CCP-CPSU po-
lemic unfolded in the early 1960s. Enver Hoxha and his Albanian Labor Party
(the ALP, Albania’s communist party) enthusiastically supported China’s
Cultural Revolution as a necessary ideological purification of the proletariat
vanguard along the lines of Stalin’s continual purges. As China moved away
from ideologically driven foreign policies toward pragmatic approaches
based on China’s national interest under Zhou Enlai’s tutelage in 1968–1971,
Albanian-Chinese relations began to deteriorate.^32
Hoxha’s objection to Zhou’s pragmatic diplomacy began in fall 1968 fol-
lowing the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. At that juncture, China
began urging formation of some sort of bloc, even a military alliance if possi-
ble, between Albania, Romania, and Yugoslavia, all communist-ruled Balkan
countries that hewed to lines independent of Moscow. Such an arrangement
made sense to Zhou because united these Balkan countries would be bet-
ter able to resist Soviet intimidation. Hoxha rejected such an arrangement
because the ruling parties of Romania and Yugoslavia were revisionist and