Chinese Policy Toward Indonesia, 1949-1967

Book excerpt: China's alliance with Indonesia in the mid-sixties appeared to be a spectacular achievement of diplomatic strategy, yet it became a major foreign policy disaster for China. To explore this turn-about, Professor Mozingo offers a persuasive analysis of the competing forces that shaped Beijing's policy towards Jakarta and the factors that ultimately led to its downfall. He explains how and why Chinese policy in Indonesia shifted dramatically from hostility to peaceful coexistence and back again to hostility. "Although considerations of global strategy predominantly influenced the design and execution of that policy," he writes, "the decisive factor affecting the outcome of the Sino-Indonesian relationship consistently proved to be the domestic political processes in Indonesia, over which Beijing had little or no control." In the end, China was unable to resolve the contradiction between considerations of realpolitik and of its own revolutionary ethos. He argues that this same contradiction is responsible for the highly ambivalent attitude that Beijing has displayed in its relations with other non-communist Arfo-Asian countries since 1949. Through this informed analysis of the Sino-Indonesian relationship, now brought back to life as a member of Equinox Publishing's Classic Indonesia series, Professor Mozingo has clarified the larger pattern of China's evolving diplomatic strategy in the Third World before the Cultural Revolution. DAVID MOZINGO is Professor of Government and Director, International Relations of East Asia Project, at Cornell University. A graduate of the University of California, Loa Angeles, he received his MA and PhD degrees there. He was formerly a staff member of the Rand Corporation, and Director, China-Japan Program, at Cornell University.