Quest to Transform Southeast Asia } 197
neutrality. Moreover, Chinese support for revolutionary movements within
a Southeast Asian country was likely to push that country into alignment
with US containment efforts. China’s diplomacy during the Bandung era
had clearly recognized this and attempted to reassure countries of China’s
nonthreatening intentions in order to counter US efforts to contain China.
Why then did Beijing discard efforts to reassure Southeast Asian govern-
ments and opt, instead, to support communist insurgencies that would
push Southeast Asian countries toward Washington? Ideological commit-
ment to spreading socialism is a large part of the explanation of China’s
period of revolutionary activism. Mao sought the victory of communist-led
armed struggles across Southeast Asia because he believed that such victo-
ries would be a great advance for these peoples along the historical teleology
laid out by Marxism-Leninism and to which Mao had dedicated his life.
Mao believed that Lenin and Stalin had demonstrated their commitment
to this great cause of world socialism, and he too, would establish himself
as successor to those exalted demigods by making great contributions to
that historic project. The CCP’s December 1956 statement on the “Stalin
question,” for example, explained that “part of the universally applicable
truth of Marxism-Leninism is that the revolutionary state firmly adheres to
the principle of proletarian internationalism ... and strives to help ... all op-
pressed nations.” The statement lauded the advances of socialism achieved
under Stalin:
The heroic armies of the Soviet Union liberated the East European
countries and the northern part of Korea in cooperation with the pop-
ular forces of those countries. The Soviet Union has established friendly
relations with the People’s Democracies, and aided them in economic
construction and, together with them, formed a mighty bulwark of
world peace ... the camp of socialism. The Soviet Union has also given
powerful support to the independence movements of the oppressed
nations ... to the many peaceable new states in Asia and Africa estab-
lished since the Second World War.”^2
If Stalin’s contributions to expanding world socialism had come prima-
rily in Eastern Europe, Mao’s would come in Southeast Asia. Stalin had used
Soviet armed forces as an agent of social revolution. Mao Zedong would not
do that, he and his comrades decided. But that did not mean they abandoned
their revolutionary duty. Revolutions in various countries would have to be
made by the people of those countries. Revolution should not be exported by
tanks and bayonets. But the principles of Marxism-Leninism required that
China fulfill its proletarian internationalist duty by supporting revolutionary
struggles. Of course, success in spreading socialism would indicate that Mao,
not Khrushchev, was “correct” and thus entitled to recognition as successor