The Cultural Revolution } 271
popular but apocryphal legend, a sign at the entrance to the European prome-
nade on the waterfront reading “No dogs or Chinese allowed.”
Revolutionary Struggle within the Foreign Affairs System
The revolutionary extremism that seized Chinese foreign relations during the
Cultural Revolution was partially a function of the political imperative that
individuals in the foreign affairs system demonstrate their revolutionary
bona fides. (The MFA and schools and organizations involved in foreign af-
fairs together constituted the “foreign affairs system,” or xitong.) Survival,
let alone promotion, in the MFA now required that Chinese personnel sta-
tioned abroad prove their loyalty to Mao and his revolutionary line. This was
especially the case for diplomats, who enjoyed standards of living far above
those in China, who often dressed in Western-style clothes, spoke foreign lan-
guages, and had contacts with all sorts of suspicious foreigners. When they
were called back home to account for their actions abroad and to criticize
their own and each other’s ideological shortcomings, a documented record of
ardent revolutionary diplomatic struggle abroad was a good defense.
As the Cultural Revolution unfolded during the second half of 1966, the
Party Committee within the MFA, headed by foreign minister Chen Yi and
party secretary and vice premier Ji Pengfei, guided the Cultural Revolution
within the foreign affairs system.^16 Chen and Ji tried to focus the movement
on criticism of low-level cadres who had made mistakes, and on criticism of
bourgeois art (a main focus of Cultural Revolution criticism at that time). At
the start of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi, certainly with
Mao’s approval, had directed that China’s overseas embassies would not be
involved in the Cultural Revolution. Then, in September 1966, Mao received
a letter from a group of leftist foreigners who had attended an international
conference in Vienna and come away dismayed at the bourgeois demeanor of
China’s representatives, who had arrived in expensive cars and wearing fine
Western-style suits and ties. Clearly they had been corrupted by the Western,
bourgeois lifestyle. Mao was struck by the letter and remarked that the staff at
Chinese embassies apparently needed to be revolutionized. Mao’s comments
became known across the foreign affairs system and encouraged young and
dissident radicals in that system who wanted to expand the range of revolu-
tionary struggle and perhaps displace their bosses. By late 1966, radical Red
Guards in organizations across China, including in the foreign affairs system,
were demanding—with the encouragement of senior Maoist leaders—the
targeting for struggle of top-level power holders “taking the capitalist road.”
Within the foreign affairs system, radical Red Guards, both in Beijing and in
Chinese embassies abroad, began to criticize the bureaucratic work style and
privileged, “bourgeois” life styles of top diplomats. Red Guards also began