the PRC. In Indochina and Malaya, communist forces were pitted
against colonial regimes in wars that would delay independence—and
thus formal relations with China—for years.
In both China and the four independent nations of Southeast
Asia, new ruling elites faced the delicate task of forging new relations
with each other. The Chinese Communist Party had long maintained
clandestine contacts with communist parties in Southeast Asia, but
these had almost entirely been through their overseas Chinese
members. CCP contacts with indigenous communists had been few
and insignificant, apart from the special case of Vietnam. One problem
that confronted the PRC, therefore, was how to relate to non-
communist ruling elites. It did so at first from the ideological perspective
of Marxism–Leninism.
The Chinese Marxist–Leninist worldview
Like their Nationalist opponents, Chinese communists had looked to
Europe for new ideas to replace discredited Confucianism. But whereas
the GMD was eclectic in its borrowing (including even Marxist–Leninist
‘democratic centralism’ for its political organisation), the CCP was
single-minded in its commitment to communism. Both parties, however,
grafted sometimes ill-assimilated Western notions onto a Chinese base.
From the late 1930s Marxism–Leninism in China carried with it a strong
component of what came to be called ‘Mao Zedong thought’, and Mao
was deeply Chinese. Unlike Ho Chi Minh (or Zhou Enlai), who had
travelled the world and spoke European languages, Mao knew only
China and Chinese. His education took in the Chinese classics on war
and statecraft, and he was well versed in Chinese history and literature.
Moreover, Mao was not only Chairman of the CCP, but also its leading
theoretician. Thus, although the adoption of Marxism–Leninism
entailed acceptance of a radically new view of the world, by 1949 that
view was deeply imbued with ‘Chinese characteristics’.
Communism and the Cold War