contribute according to their abilities and from which all would
benefit according to their needs. This heady brothers-in-arms vision
went by the name of ‘proletarian internationalism’, and presupposed
the equality of both fraternal parties and those states in which they
had succeeded in seizing power.
The reality was rather different. Under Stalin, the Soviet
Union arrogated to itself the right to guide and direct world commu-
nism. Just as previously Moscow had proclaimed itself the ‘third Rome’
of Orthodox Christianity (after Rome itself and Constantinople),
under communism the Soviet Union was the fount of orthodoxy. Its
model of urban proletarian revolution when applied in China,
however, led only to disaster when the Shanghai uprising of 1927 was
ruthlessly suppressed. The significance of the ultimate success of
Mao’s rural, peasant-based revolution lay in two things: it drew upon
Chinese, not Soviet, historical experience; and it was shaped within
the context of Chinese circumstances, including cultural beliefs and
values. It thereby provided a new and different model of revolution,
one that the Chinese believed, with some justification, was much
more applicable in Asia than was the Soviet model.^2 One of the first
demands made by China in its alliance with the Soviet Union was to
be given primary responsibility for promoting communist revolution
in Asia.
The countries of Southeast Asia, so the Chinese leadership
believed, were ripe for revolution. In their analysis, imperialism was
attempting to consolidate its hold either by handing power to compli-
ant client elites (as in the Philippines and Burma) or by reasserting
direct rule (as in Malaya, Indonesia and Indochina). Progressive forces
in these countries, led by Marxist parties, were fighting to prevent this
and to bring about genuine revolution. It was China’s internationalist
duty to support such forces. This meant backing both liberation move-
ments fighting to expel colonial powers (the nationalist bourgeois–
democratic phase) and revolutionary movements seeking to overthrow
conservative indigenous ruling elites (to bring about the subsequent
Communism and the Cold War