The People's Republic of China in the United Nations: A Preliminary Analysis

After having suffered from the self-inflicted wounds of internal convulsions and diplomatic isolation during the Cultural Revolution, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has returned to the world diplomatic scene with a new, vigorous, and imaginative foreign policy. To appreciate its dimensions fully, one must recall that China's foreign policy was left largely unprotected from the disruptive spillovers of the domestic quarrels during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards not only sacked the British chancery in Peking, but also seized their own Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 1967. By November 1967, forty-four out of forty-five ambassadors were called home for “rectification,” leaving the durable Huang Hua in Cairo as the PRC's sole representative abroad. China's trade also suffered; by the end of September 1967, Peking had been involved in disputes of varying intensity with some thirty-two nations. However, the transition from revolutionary turmoil to pragmatic reconstruction came through a series of decisions made by Mao Tse-tung and his close advisors beginning in late July 1968 and culminating at the First Plenum of the Ninth Party Congress held in April 1969, ushering in a new era in Chinese foreign policy. toward the United Nations may be characterized as one of “love me or leave me, but don't leave me alone,” evolving through the stages of naive optimism, frustration, disenchantment, anger, and lingering envy and hope, the PRC's support of the principles of the United Nations Charter had remained largely unaffected from 1945 to 1964. However, the Indonesian withdrawal on January 7, 1965, triggered off a process of negative polemics against the United Nations. Indeed, Peking's bill of complaints against the United Nations was broad and sweeping: that blind faith in the United Nations had to be stopped because the organization was by no means sacred and inviolable; that by committing sins of commission and omission, the United Nations had become an adjunct of the U.S. State Department; that the United Nations had become a channel for United States economic and cultural penetration into Asian, African, and Latin American countries; and that the United Nations in the final analysis was a paper tiger.