concerned as insurgency broke out in the north and northeast of the
country, backed by the strident Voice of the People of Thailand broad-
casting out of southern China. On the Thai–Malaya border, the
Malayan Communist Party was again active, while in Burma, Beijing
gave new encouragement to the Burmese Communist Party. The sight
of radical overseas Chinese students chanting Maoist slogans in South-
east Asian capitals fanned fears of Chinese communist subversion.
Even relations between Beijing and Rangoon became severely strained
and ambassadors were withdrawn, while Cambodia, too, threatened to
break diplomatic relations.
Chinese relations with Southeast Asia had reached their nadir.
Dwindling Chinese influence in Indochina followed the fiasco in
Indonesia. Suspicion of China and fear of communist subversion were
factors in bringing together five anti-communist Southeast Asian
countries—Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Thai-
land—to form the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Burma chose not to join in order to preserve its neutral status. ASEAN
was immediately denounced by Beijing as an instrument of US policy,
and subjected to vituperative abuse. Though the organisation was rel-
atively ineffective in presenting a unified regional response to what
was perceived as the growing communist threat, it did create some
sense of regional solidarity.
As so often before in Chinese history, it was fear over the secu-
rity threat along China’s vulnerable northern frontier that led to a
rethinking of the direction of Chinese foreign policy, rather than the
failure of its Southeast Asian strategy. After the border clashes of 1969,
Beijing decided it had no alternative but to ‘play the American card’
as protection against a hostile Soviet Union. A secret visit to Beijing
by Henry Kissinger, then President Richard Nixon’s national security
adviser, laid the groundwork for Nixon’s own visit to China in Febru-
ary 1972. The two sides agreed to work towards normalisation of
relations, and to oppose hegemony in the Asia–Pacific region, a clause
that made clear the anti-Soviet thrust of Sino–US reconciliation. As
Communism and the Cold War