ABSTRACT
The strategy which Mao Zedong had mapped out for China by the end of the 1950s was a dual one. In the long term China should seek to gain a position of economic and military strength which would entitle it to a legitimate voice in world affairs and to the serious respect and attention of its major enemy, American imperialism. From the outside China’s course may have appeared to be at times erratic but there was throughout an underlying continuity of outlook and strategy based upon what is now described as ‘Chairman Mao’s revolutionary diplomatic line’. China’s nuclear capability, though in the early stage of its development making the nation more vulnerable to a pre-emptive attack, had also by the last 1960s reached the threshold of ‘credibility’. In fact China’s diplomacy operated at a variety of levels. China had become ‘the centre of world revolution’.
