200 { China’s Quest
Beijing’s Dual-Track Approach (Party and State)Chinese support for wars of national liberation in the intermediate zone be-
tween the socialist camp and imperialism could easily spoil PRC relations
with governments targeted for overthrow. The CCP attempted to manage this
contradiction by insisting that government-to-government ties were separate
from party-to-party ties between the CCP and foreign communist parties at
the core of wars of national liberation. This was called the “dual-track ap-
proach.” Under it, the MFA sought friendly, cooperative relations with the
governments of various countries, even while the CCP’s International Liaison
Department (ILD) might be training and financing an insurgency seeking to
overthrow those governments. Visits by foreign communist leaders to China
for talks with CCP officials were often publicized with the party affiliation of
the Chinese officials receiving them being carefully specified. Such interac-
tions were carefully scripted as party-to-party, and not state-to-state, inter-
actions. This did not greatly reassure governments targeted for overthrow.
Memory of this twenty-year-long period of Chinese revolutionary activism,
from 1960 to 1979, is an important part of the contemporary Southeast Asian
perceptions of China.
Deep secrecy about China’s support for foreign insurgencies was a sec-
ond tactic used by Beijing to manage the contradiction between the two
halves of the dual-track approach. Communist Party of Malaya chief Chin
Peng outlined the scope of ILD work underway and the veil of secrecy sur-
rounding that work when he arrived in Beijing in June 1961. Chin Peng was
surprised by the extent of ILD support for various Southeast Asian commu-
nist parties: “I realised the Chinese Communists were well down the track of
funding the other South East Asian fraternal parties. All had representatives
in residence and large batches of people under varying training schemes.”^3
The Burma, Thai, Cambodian, Laotian, and Indonesian communist parties
all had “training facilities” in China, Peng discovered. Delegations of these
parties were housed in a well-guarded, walled, isolated, and secret compound
in central Beijing run by the CCP’s International Liaison Department. To en-
hance secrecy, family members of the various foreign delegations lived in this
walled compound, but they were not allowed to enter a separate work area.
Two Politburo members, Kang Sheng and Liu Ningyi, the former being one of
China’s most powerful leaders, oversaw the compound and conducted discus-
sions with the foreign partydelegations. Kang was a member of the Politburo
Standing Committee with responsibility for internal security and external
intelligence. He was also one of Mao’s key allies in the struggle against “revi-
sionists” within the CCP. Chin Peng assumed that Liu and Kang reported
to Mao.
The CCP maintained ties with several East Asian communist parties
before 1949, and those ties thickened after that pivotal year. But it was not