territory. This was enough for Beijing, since it would eliminate any
American military threat from Laos. Hanoi, too, made no objection.
The First Lao Coalition government (including two Pathet Lao minis-
ters) took office in November 1957, with the blessing of the Chinese
and to the fury of the United States.
Suvanna was of the royal clan of Luang Phrabang, a kingdom
that had preserved a degree of autonomy by paying tribute simultane-
ously to Siam, Vietnam and China. He understood far better than most
that Lao independence could only be preserved by taking account of
China’s security concerns, and by relying on China to bring pressure to
bear on Vietnam. Suvanna’s government lasted just eight months
before the United States engineered his overthrow. His successor not
only excluded Pathet Lao ministers from his government, but with
American blessing established diplomatic relations with both South
Vietnam and Taiwan. Within a year Laos had returned to civil war. It
took a neutralist coup d’étatin Viang Chan and substantial gains by
communist forces to convince the incoming American administration
of President John F. Kennedy to back the neutralist option for Laos. A
new conference was convened in Geneva in 1962, attended by Beijing,
which threw its support behind a Second Coalition government. That
government established diplomatic relations with both the PRC and
North Vietnam. But for Laos it was too late for neutrality, for the
country’s strategic location ensured it would be drawn inexorably into
the Second Indochina War.
This series of Chinese foreign policy initiatives towards South-
east Asia in the ‘Bandung spirit’ should be seen, not apart from, but in
conjunction with China’s disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’. This is not
to suggest, given the turmoil and famine in China between 1958 and
1962, that the PRC was acting from a position of weakness. The link,
rather, is that through both its economic development policy and its
foreign policy, China was seeking rapidly to augment both its econ-
omic power and its standing in the world. The two went together. In
the end, neither achieved what had been hoped for: the former
Communism and the Cold War