ABSTRACT
Until 1978, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided to shift its major mission from class struggle to economic reconstruction, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) foreign policy was described by some scholars as primarily driven by political ideology, to the extent that rational calculation of power and interests were relegated to a secondary position. According to one scholar during the Maoist era, the themes that summed up Beijing’s foreign policy were national unity, socialist revolution, export of Communist ideology, anti-Americanism and pro-Sovietism, and restoration of Chinese primacy in Asia.1 For the sake of facilitating large-scale mobilization of the Chinese people for socialist reconstruction, Mao even deliberately fostered a high degree of tension between China and the West so as to create a siege mentality among the people and whip up nationalist fervor. As a result, the role of ideology in China’s foreign policy was further fortified. Such understanding of Chinese foreign policy under Mao can also be found in studies on the relationship between the CCP and the United States during the Chinese civil war in the second half of the 1940s and the decision of the PRC to enter the Korean War.2
