94 { China’s Quest
The United States did what it could to encourage China’s isolation. China’s
belligerent policies in Korea and Indochina, plus its militant rhetoric, greatly
facilitated Washington’s efforts at isolating “Red China.”
China’s appeal to the emerging countries in the mid-1950s was a manifes-
tation of Mao’s thinking about an “intermediate zone” between the social-
ist and imperialist camps. As early as 1921, a congress of the Communist
International decided to seek a broad but anti-imperialist united front in the
colonies and semi-colonies, especially China, India, Persia, and Turkey. This
entailed a united front with nationalist “anti-imperialist” but noncommunist
movements, the most important of which was SunYat-sen’s KMT in China.
Then, in 1940, in debates with Stalin over whether CCP forces should focus on
attacking Japanese forces (Moscow’s preference) or on building base areas be-
hind Japanese lines, Mao formulated the idea of revolutionary struggle in the
intermediate zone as a way of defending the socialist countries.^6 Mao’s rebuttal
to Stalin was that expanding revolution in the intermediate zone between the
USSR and the imperialist countries was the best way to prevent imperialist
attack on the socialist citadel. In 1946, Mao announced that the countries
between the socialist and imperialist camps constituted a “vast intermediate
zone” which was the focus of imperialist aggression. Consolidation of impe-
rialist control over this intermediate zone was a precondition for imperialist
attack on the socialist camp.^7 China’s moderate courtship of noncommunist
but anti-Western governments was, in effect, an anti-imperialist united front
from above.
The strategy of a broad united front mobilizing a wide array of forces but
led by communists was propounded by Lenin and applied very effectively by
Mao in the 1930s and 1940s. Perfected in dealings with the KMT, Japanese
invaders, the United States, and various Chinese warlords and factions, Mao’s
united front doctrine stressed the exploitation of contradictions within the
enemy camp to isolate a primary enemy, thereby defeating enemies one at
a time. The widest possible array of forces were to be “united with” and the
spearhead of attack directed against the primary enemy—Japan, the KMT,
or the United States—as defined by the CCP for each stage of the revolution.
During the mid-1950s, Zhou Enlai was given free rein by Mao to use subtle
and moderate diplomatic tactics to apply this doctrine against the United
States.^8 Many of the new nations emerging out of the collapse of European
and Japanese empires seemed to Zhou to offer good opportunities for appli-
cation of a united front doctrine. Even within the imperialist camp, con-
tradictions might be exploited by adroit maneuver. Britain and France, for
example, might not like US policies of confrontation, and could possibly be
maneuvered to oppose the United States. For such an approach to be effective,
however, China and the Soviet Union would need to take more moderate,
more “realistic,” and less belligerent-sounding stances. Chinese and Soviet
leaders agreed to implement this new approach in tandem. In September 1953,