340 { China’s Quest
a June 1978 visit by Foreign Minister Huang Hua. The Iranian political context
of Hua’s visit was, however, dramatically different. By 1978, tensions gener-
ated by hyperdevelopment under the shah’s ambitious programs had turned
into powerful protests against his regime. By the time Hua Guofeng arrived
in Tehran, large and militant crowds mobilized by radical clerics in Iran’s
mosques were confronting police nearly every week. The size and militancy
of protests were rapidly increasing. Symbols of Western influence—cinemas,
nightclubs—were targets of arson and other forms of attack. Police fired
on crowds, but this only further antagonized them. The shah’s regime had,
in fact, entered its terminal crisis. A mere four months after Hua’s visit,
the shah fled Tehran for good and Islamic revolutionary leader Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini made a deity-like return to assume leadership of a new
revolutionary Iran.
Into this revolutionary upheaval flew Hua Guofeng and his entourage. The
key purpose of Hua’s visit was to demonstrate China’s warm and full support
for the shah and his leadership of Iran. Hua praised the wise and far-sighted
leadership of the shah and Iran’s accomplishments under his rule. In the con-
text of 1978, those signals conveyed to the revolution-minded people of Iran a
very different message: China supported Iran’s ancien régime. China’s media
strengthened this perception by condemning anti-shah protests for under-
mining order and progress, perhaps under instigation from the Soviet Union.
As protests mounted in Iran, China’s leaders were quick to see a nefarious
Soviet hand behind them. China’s diplomats and leaders were also shocked
by US criticism of the shah at this juncture. Instead of giving the shah, their
ally, full and unequivocal support in this crisis, American representatives
undermined him with criticism, at least from Beijing’s point of view. The full
and robust support conveyed by Hua Guofeng was intended, in part, to stand
in contradistinction to American vacillation. In this regard, China’s diplo-
macy was successful. In his final testament, the shah wrote, “I must also pay
homage to the loyalty of the Chinese leaders. When Mr. Hua Kuo-feng visited
me, at a time when the Iranian crisis was reaching its peak, I had the impres-
sion that the Chinese alone were in favor of a strong Iran.”^54 What caused
the shah to be grateful infuriated Iranian revolutionaries. By the time the
shah fled in January 1979, Chinese diplomats in Tehran were reporting post-
ers condemning the United States, Israel, and China for their support of the
shah. Hua’s visit destroyed the Sino-Iranian relation. It would take Beijing
five years to rebuild it.Countering the Danger of European AppeasementEurope, as the traditional center of Cold War tension, played an important
role in Mao’s effort to shift the development of the global correlation of forces