ABSTRACT
In March 1963, China's Prime Minister, Chou En-Lai, paid an official visit to Cairo. 1 Reviewing the visit, al-Khuli praised the achievements of the Chinese revolution and pointed to a parallel in the timing of the Chinese and Egyptian revolutions. ‘At the same historical stage of the victory of the Chinese revolution, the revolution for national liberation led by Nasser achieved a victory in Egypt in 1952’, he noted. 2 The two revolutions, he argued, heralded the onset of a new revolutionary track: movements of national liberation which declared war against both the new and the old imperialism. These movements fought feudalism, exploitative monopolism and economic backwardness with socialism as their guiding principle. Their victories generated ‘winds of change’ in the world, marking a shift in the balance of forces between the social classes in favour of the popular classes. As a result of the Chinese revolution, the communist camp had expanded to the point where it represented 35 per cent of the world's population. Similarly, the Egyptian revolution had significantly strengthened the ‘progressive movement for national liberation’, which constituted 46 per cent of humanity. The capitalist world, explained al-Khuli, had declined considerably owing to these developments and now encompassed only 19 per cent of the global population. These changes in the international balance of power had precipitated the consolidation of a new bloc of countries known as the ‘Third World’. The emergence of this third global power, the national revolutionary force, had been facilitated by the advent of the Egyptian revolution of 1952. 3 That revolution had adopted a new line with regard to global policy and had created, together with the forces of liberation in Asia and Africa, ‘positive neutralism’ (al-hiyad al-ijabi), meaning non-alignment with either of the two main blocs. The policy of ‘positive neutralism’ entailed a dedicated struggle against imperialism, monopolism and economic regression. 4
