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world to prevent the spread of revisionist Soviet social-imperialism’s
rampant aggressive forces. ... We must unite with the Third World,
win over the Second World, and take advantage of the splits between
the two superpowers to divide them and to undermine the collusive
scheme to divide the world behind the scenes. By winning the United
Sates over to our side, we can concentrate all our forces to deal with the
arch-enemy—revisionist Soviet social-imperialism.^23
In response to the perceived adverse evolution of the global correlation
of forces, Beijing unfolded a campaign, from roughly 1974 to about 1982, to
nudge world events in a direction more favorable to China: a campaign to
build a global united front against Soviet expansionism. The central idea of
this campaign was that the Soviet challenge was global and had to be resisted
globally. Beijing felt that the West was repeating its fatal mistake of the
1930s, when Britain and France had responded to the aggressive buildup of
Germany’s power with a policy of conciliation, giving in to Hitler’s successive
demands, and military weakness. The result had been seven years in which
Hitler completed his strategic deployments and then launched a war from
a very strong position. In the 1970s as in the 1930s, Beijing believed, weak-
ness would embolden expansionism. But firm, resolute, tit-for-tat resistance
by people around the world would check the Soviet Union and prevent it from
launching a third world war.^24
The conceptual framework for the global anti-Soviet front was the
Three Worlds Theory announced to the world by Deng Xiaoping at the
above-mentioned Special Session of the United Nations on raw materials and
development in 1974. According to the Three Worlds Theory, the two super-
powers, the USSR and the United States, constituted the First World. Both
of these superpowers sought global hegemony and colluded and contended
with each other in pursuit of that objective. The second world consisted of
the industrialized countries other than the two superpowers—Western and
Eastern Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan. The Third World consisted of
the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. China was part
of the Third World. Both the Second and the Third Worlds were oppressed
economically and politically by the two superpowers, but the burden of
oppression fell most heavily, of course, on the developing countries of the
Third World. The people and countries of the world wanted liberation, and
this could only come about by overthrowing the hegemonist domination of
the two superpowers. The key to achieving this was to mobilize the Third
World and exploit contradictions between the First and Second Worlds to
win over the Second World to the anti-superpower struggle. Contradictions
between the two superpowers might also be exploited, possibly aligning
one of the superpowers against the other.^25 China’s alignment with the
United States against Soviet revisionist social imperialist expansionism