ABSTRACT
Focusing on the strategic and international context in which China’s relations with India unfolded in the wake of the tumultuous Great Leap Forward (GLF; 1958-60) helps our understanding both of the country’s failure to resolve the bilateral boundary dispute and of the ensuing war in 1962. The comparative analysis of the relations of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the other South Asian neighbours at the time of the war in 1962 further deepens our understanding of China’s efforts to resolve its boundary dispute with India. Actually, in the years before the war with India, Beijing had adopted a new foreign policy strategy that was motivated by the parallel decline of China’s relations with India and the Soviet Union, and the escalating US involvement in Southeast Asia.1 As Beijing began to seek a resolution of its multiple boundary problems ‘left over by history’, it focused on ‘diplomacy and the nation’s security’.2 It undertook efforts to improve its relations with its neighbours in an attempt to balance against the perceived threats emanating from the Soviet Union, the United States and India.3 Indeed, China’s successful boundary settlements with Burma, Nepal and Pakistan at around the 1962 war facilitated closer, or at least less hostile, relations with these neighbours.4 Previous authors have speculated that the accommodation of Burmese, Nepalese and Pakistani territorial demands was motivated by China’s efforts to pressure India into accepting a compromise settlement or into embarrassing India for its refusal to negotiate.5 The pragmatic Chinese policy of the ‘Three Conciliations and one Reduction’ (sanhe yishao), however, was supposed to ameliorate tension between the PRC and the ‘modern revisionists’ (the Soviet Union), ‘imperialists’ (the United States) and ‘reactionaries’ (mainly India, but also Pakistan and Burma), and to reduce its support for leftist national liberation movements throughout the world in order to improve relations with its neighbours.6 Despite the radical inclinations of many of China’s top
leaders at the time, Beijing pursued a policy of conciliation because the strategic imperatives of China’s international environment threatened to undermine its domestic and ideological long-term objectives.7
