ABSTRACT
‘The feeble-minded bourgeoisie of the East’ was the famous phrase with which the Chinese, at the time of their own victory, tagged the newly independent bourgeois leaderships of India, Indonesia and Burma. The Taiwan Straits confrontation was a textbook example of the Chinese policy, later on to be publicly spelt out in polemics with the Soviet Union, of giving ‘tit for tat’ in the struggle with imperialism. In practice the overall impression formed by the outside world of China’s foreign policy intentions depended a great deal on the relative weight attached to these terms. A nation could win independence from the colonial power, whether the revolution was led by the proletariat or by the national bourgeoisie. China’s adoption of a more ‘revolutionary’ posture in its foreign policy was partly a response to the growing pressures for and against revolution in the developing countries which, symbolized by Vietnam, would become the focus of world attention in the 1960s.
