268 { China’s Quest
Beijing in April. After a week the Indonesian chargé d’affaires and atta-
ché were expelled. At the airport, they made their way to their airplane
through crowds of Red Guards who spit on, hit, and cursed them. Similar
indignities befell the Indonesian consulate in Guangzhou. Indonesia and
China severed diplomatic relations in October 1967—not to be restored
until 1990.
China’s relations with Burma also deteriorated sharply. As noted earlier,
under China’s “dual-track” approach, the CCP had rendered assistance to the
Communist Party of Burma since 1962. But Beijing had not publicly endorsed
the CPB’s insurrection and had maintained cordial relations with Burma’s
non-aligned government. Burma received Chinese aid, and there were fre-
quent friendly interactions between Chinese and Burmese leaders throughout
the first half of the 1960s. Then, in 1967, under the influence of the Cultural
Revolution and instigation by staff of the Chinese embassy in Rangoon,
ethnic Chinese students in Rangoon began wearing Mao badges and propa-
gating Mao Zedong Thought. Burma’s government deployed soldiers to put
an end to this revolutionary agitation. Confrontations turned into clashes
and then into outright anti-Chinese riots. Over one hundred Chinese were
killed, including one Chinese aid worker. The next day, the Chinese embassy
in Rangoon was attacked by mobs. China retaliated by launching four con-
secutive days of demonstrations of over a million people outside the Burmese
embassy in Beijing. In Rangoon, the PRC embassy delivered a threatening
note to the Burmese government:
Chairman Mao is the very red sun that shines most brightly in our
hearts and Mao Zedong thought is our lifeline. We must warn you that
we will fight to the end against anyone who dares to oppose Chairman
Mao and Mao Zedong Thought. Anyone who dares to oppose Chairman
Mao and Mao Zedong Thought is hitting his head against a brick wall
and inviting his own destruction.^12
Sino-Burma relations came close to the breaking point. Regarding India, in
June 1967 two Indian diplomats who had been following Cultural Revolution
events around Beijing were accused of spying. The Red Guard wanted to try
them before a mass assembly of 10,000 people, but the MFA ordered them
expelled instead. At the airport, the Indian diplomats were kicked and hit,
had their clothes ripped, and were dragged across the runway. The melee
ended when Red Guard leaders blew whistles, whereupon “the masses” fell
into columns and marched away. Two days later, angry Indian mobs attacked
the Chinese embassy in New Delhi.
Among the foreign and diplomatic community in Beijing, by mid-1967
there was widespread fear of attack by xenophobic and paranoid Chinese
zealots. There was also a sense of solidarity among the entire foreign diplo-
matic community in Beijing in the face of the seemingly irrational extremism.