Foreign Relations of the Asian Communist Satellites

Abstract

ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO, a reference to might well have been misinterpreted, and even today the term is not without its ambiguities. It could scarcely be regarded any longer as including Communist China, but the question, whose are the Peoples Republics of Mongolia, Vietnam and Korea, actually is not always easy to answer. Obviously the most important of all three are those which they have with their allies in the Communist Bloc-especially with China and the Soviet Union-but these relationships will not be discussed here in any detail. It is questionable whether one can legitimately refer to foreign relations (in the usual sense of the word) in situations where the inter-party contacts are obviously the dominant factor. The diplomatic missions exchanged between Ulan Bator, Hanoi and Pyongyang on the one hand, and Peking and Moscow on the other, do not derive their importance from their diplomatic status so much as from their role as lines of communication between the various Communist parties;' the points of interest which might be discussed, such as trade and aid agreements or jockeying for ideological support in the Sino-Soviet dispute, fall outside the normal concepts of foreign relations. Similarly, the very important relationships between North and South Vietnam and North and South Korea are hardly of any recognizable type. Important and interesting as these relationships may be, they cannot well be analyzed within the limited framework of this article. The aspect of North Korean, North Vietnamese and Mongolian foreign relations which is of most concern to us here is the emergence of the three countries on the wider international scene, and the degree of acceptance which they stand to achieve. It has become possible only in the past decade or so to discuss the Asian satellites as a sort of unit. Traditionally, the three areas had little in common beyond the fact that all were Asian, and to a greater or lesser extent stood under the influence of the Middle Kingdom. Even today, in a formal sense, their only additional binding factor is a common allegiance to one or another