Quest to Transform Southeast Asia } 229
Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, and the Philippines, as well as the
states of northeastern India. The CCP supported a coordinated offensive; in-
deed, it probably played the central role in coordinating that revolutionary
thrust. There are occasional insights about how the pieces fit together. When
Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi met with Sukarno in late 1964, they urged him to
abandon commando raids on peninsular Malaya. Instead, large numbers of
Indonesian communists (PKI members) should be infiltrated into Peninsular
Malaya. This would help reduce the ethnically Chinese and increase the eth-
nically Malay complexion of the CPM insurgency. As part of this arrange-
ment, Beijing would order the CPM to open a new front on the Malay-Thai
border, appealing to the secessionist impulses of Thai Muslims. As part of
these plans, China was prepared to arm 100,000 guerrilla fighters.^95 The joint
communiqué issued at the end of Chen Yi’s Indonesia visit called for merg-
ing Indonesia’s confrontation against Malaysia with South Vietnam’s struggle
against the Americans, plus other anti-imperialist struggles in the region, to
form a single regionwide anti-imperialist struggle.
One strategic objective of the CCP’s Southeast Asian revolutionary push
was to push US imperialism out of its footholds in Southeast Asia and make
China’s vulnerable southern flank more secure. But the way in which that
was to be done was by bringing communist parties to power. Moreover, ex-
pulsion of US military presence from areas close to China was clearly not the
motive with the important cases of Burma, Indonesia, or Cambodia. None
of those states hosted a US presence or was aligned with the United States.
Yet all three were targeted for revolutionary transformation under the tute-
lage of communist parties. A better approximation of Mao’s grand strategic
objective seems to have been the creation of a socialist camp in Southeast Asia
that would look with gratitude to China for guidance, a sort of red buffer or
sphere of influence for revolutionary, socialist China. China would also be-
come the paramount power in a large region contiguous to China which had
historically been within (or at least many of the states of that region were) the
Sino-centric tributary system which many Chinese, perhaps including Mao,
saw as the natural order of things.
Successful application of the CCP’s line of protracted people’s war would
also demonstrate that Mao Zedong, not Nikita Khrushchev, was the “cor-
rect” theorist and thus leader of the international communist movement. The
CCP’s embrace of revolutionary activism circa 1960–1961 grew out of, and was
an extension of, the escalating polemic between the CCP and the CPSU over
the line of the international communist movement. Key “errors” of the “revi-
sionist” line of the CPSU and Khrushchev were, in Mao’s view, the notion that
peaceful transition to socialism was possible, and that support by socialist
countries for wars of national liberation in developing countries was too dan-
gerous. By rejecting these propositions and by successfully applying correct
Marxist-Leninist principles in Southeast Asia, Mao would garner for himself