Abstract
To all intents and purposes, the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 is one of the most significant events in twentieth-century world politics. It helped reshape the political and strategic balance in the post-war international system, and has since exercised profound and lasting influence in the evolution of international relations in the second half of the twentieth century. The PRC entered international politics, however, at a critical juncture in world history. By October 1949, the bipolarisation of the world was already crystallised by the division of Europe in the wake of the Berlin Crisis and the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers was taking shape with the explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb in July 1949. A titanic struggle between two ideologies, communism and capitalism and between East and West, was in the making. The emergence of the PRC in such a divided world had profound implications for its place in post-war international society.
From now on, our nation will join the great family of peace- and freedom-loving nations of the world.
Mao Zedong, 21 September 1949
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Notes
Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. V, pp. 15–18. See also, M. Y. M. Kau and J. K. Leung (eds), The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976, vol. I, pp. 5–6.
J. D. Pollack, ‘The Opening to America’, in R. MacFarquhar and J. K. Fairbank (eds), Cambridge History of China, vol. 15, The People’s Republic, Part 2: Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution, 1966–1982, p. 471.
M. Nakajima, ‘Foreign Relations: From the Korean War to the Bandung Line’, in R. MacFarquhar and J. K. Fairbank (eds), Cambridge History of China, vol. 14, The People’s Republic, Part 1, The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949–1965, p. 259.
See S. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism — American Foreign Policy since 1938, p. 188.
R. Aron, ‘Richard Nixon and the Future of American Foreign Policy’, Daedalus, (Fall 1972) 16.
See P. Evans and B. M. Frolic (eds), Reluctant Adversaries: Canada and the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1970.
Although the United Kingdom recognised the PRC as early as January 1950, full diplomatic relations between the two countries at the ambassadorial level were not established until 1972. For more details, see Pan Jin, ‘Zhong Ying Jianjiao Tanpan de Changqi Fuza Licheng’ (The Protracted Negotiation between China and Britain in Establishing Full Diplomatic Relations), Waijiao Xueyuan Xuebao (Journal of Foreign Affairs College), 3 (1992) 13–18. For Australia and New Zealand’s recognition of China, see E. Fung (ed.), From Fear to Friendship: Australia’s Policies Towards the People’s Republic of China, 1965–1982; and J. Scott, ‘Recognising China’, in M. McKinnon (ed.), New Zealand in World Affairs, 1957–1972.
For details, see Yoko Yasuhara, ‘Japan, Communist China and Export Control in Asia, 1948–1952’, Diplomatic History, 10, 1 (Winter 1986) 75–91.
R. Nixon, ‘Asia after Vietnam’, Foreign Affairs, 46, 1 (October 1967) 121.
Xinhua News Agency, China’s Foreign Relations: A Chronology of Events: 1949–1988, pp. 462–5.
G. Craig, ‘The Historian and the Study of International Relations’, American Historical Review, 88, 1 (Feb. 1983) 7.
M. H. Hunt, ‘China’s Foreign Relations in Historical Perspective’, in Harding (ed.), China’s Foreign Relations in the 1980s, pp. 25–9.
Italics my own. For an interesting account of the PRC’s policy towards foreign interests around 1949, see B. Hooper, China Stands Up: Ending the Western Presence, 1948–1950.
Chi Aiping, ‘Mao Zedong dui Xinzhongguo Waijiao Gongzuo de Zhanlue Zhidao’ (Mao Zedong’s Strategic Guidance to New China’s Diplomatic Work), Dang de Wenxian (Documentary Record of the CCP), 1 (1992), 33–4.
Mao Zedong, ‘Address to the Preparatory Meeting of the New Political Consultative Conference’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. IV, p. 408.
B. Schwartz, Reflections on the May Fourth Movement, p. 13.
L. P. Van Slyke (ed.), China White Paper (Aug. 1949) xvii.
Office of Intelligence Research Report (18 Sept. 1947), in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) (1947) VII, The Far East: China, p. 287.
Acheson’s words in a speech delivered on 30 July 1949. Quoted in T. Tsou, America’s Failure in China, 1941–1950, p. 508.
Harding, ‘China’s Changing Role in the Contemporary World’, in Harding (ed.), China’s Foreign Relations in the 1980s, pp. 179–200.
Nixon, US Foreign Policy for the 1970s, p. 16.
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© 1998 Yongjin Zhang
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Zhang, Y. (1998). Isolation or Alienation?. In: China in International Society since 1949. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373921_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373921_3
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