ABSTRACT
The 1960s saw an image of China that was different in two senses from before. First, China’s ideological and military presence was achieving global undertones. Second, the PRC became locked into simultaneous quarrels with both superpowers, its ‘fighting with two fists’ liangge quantou daren strategy, in Mao’s words in 1962, ‘abroad, the imperialists [i.e. the USA] curse us . . . the revisionists [i.e. the USSR] curse us’ (1974: 181). In addition there was a general distancing but also challenge vis-à-vis the international order. Edward Crankshaw went as far as to describe China as ‘an international pariah’ (1965: 162, also Zhang Yongjin 1998: 58) by the mid-1960s. Trends of the 1950s were reinforced and still more evident for Zhang Yongjin, in the 1960s, ‘the alienation of China from international society . . . the anomalous position of China in that society’ (1998: 17) where China could be ‘regarded as a “bogy” in world politics’ (17).
