ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the analytical chronology of Deng Xiaoping's foreign policy thinking that resulted in the specific connotations of "independent foreign policy". It also briefly reviews Deng's foreign policy thinking and then moves chronologically to trace and assess how this thinking informed Deng's foreign policy practice from 1949 to Deng's death in 1997. The chapter argues that new foreign policy problems can be continuously solved within Deng's ideological matrix of "seeking the truth from the facts". In the early to mid-1950s, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai started to set out the dialectical ABC's that culminated with Deng's 1980s "independent foreign policy". The basic principles of China's modern foreign policy were established in the original development of relations between two of Asia's greatest states. In the end, Beijing signed a thirty-year treaty of alliance and friendship with Moscow, but at the same time China's foreign policy emphasized China's "self-reliance".
