Peking in World Politics

Abstract

A ITS ESTABLISHMENT IN SAN FRANCISCO in mid-I945, the United Nations numbered 5i members. By the time of the Sixteenth General Assembly meetings in New York in the autumn of i96i, the number of member-nations had practically doubled. Not the least of the issues posed for the United Nations by this drastic expansion has been the negative problem created by the continued absence of the People's Republic of China, effectively governing a quarter of the earth's population. Peking's absence from the U. N. forum, however, has not impeded the development of active Chinese Communist policies throughout the world. Indeed the eruption of reorganized and recrudescent Chinese power has led to fundamental alterations in the design of both Far Eastern and world politics. Recognition of the new direction and force of Chinese Communist people's diplomacy is thus essential to assessment not only of the issue of Chinese representation in the U. N. but also of the radically changed political environment within which the U. N. must function during the i96os. The overwhelming majority of the states which have gained U. N. membership since I945 are new nations, intent in various ways on exploring new frontiers. With some exceptions, they are under-educated, under-industrialized, under-capitalized, under-modernized, and under-experienced in world affairs. During these years, the mature nations of western Europe and North America have steadily sought to convince the new states that they should look to the North Atlantic community for aid and development advice. The leaders of the Communist bloc, whose political conceptions stem from Lenin and the Second Comintern Congress of i920 and whose estimates of the potential importance of non-Western nationalism thus long ante-date those of the United States,' have pursued a superficially similar strategy, seeking to convince the new states to look to the Communist camp for theoretical counsel and practical assistance. For a decade after I945 the Soviet Union was the dominant spokesman for the bloc. Since the Bandung conference of i955, however, the People's