ABSTRACT
Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the People's Republic of China (PRC) was in its early years a key ally of the Soviet Union. To understand the positions the PRC adopted and the motives behind its dramatic shifts in policy, it is important to look at a number of themes in Chinese policy making and how they influenced the development of its diplomacy. The Cultural Revolution began in earnest in the summer of 1966 when Mao encouraged students to criticize the running of universities and in particular their elitist admissions and examination policies. The newly available documents on the formulation of Chinese and Soviet foreign policy during the period of the alliance have opened up the study of this area enormously. As North Korea's launching of the war in 1950 shows, from the very first it saw itself as the legitimate government of the whole of the Korean peninsula.
