Soviet and Chinese Involvement in Southern Asia

Abstract

While the ussr and China are expressing their deep mutual antagonisms in a direct confrontation by military pressures and hostile propaganda, which attract wide attention, they are also engaging in less publicized but intensely competitive struggles to penetrate the Third World. Each is seeking to establish affinitive revolutionary states throughout the developing areas, using methods intended to frustrate its rival's designs as much as possible. The main region in contest is southern Asia. Strategically and because of the vulnerabilities of its states, southern Asia comes next after the Middle East as a major area of engagement for the Soviet Union, and is of primary importance for China. Either power, if able to make substantial diplomatic or revolutionary advances in this part of the world, will be well placed to further its global designs at the expense of its socialist antagonist and of the west. The strategies of the two communist powers differ greatly. Peking's, reflecting the extremism of the Cultural Revolution, is narrowly conceived, militant to a degree that can alienate potential allies, mostly uninterested in the advantages of interaction with 'bourgeois' governments, and rather inflexible. The ussr's method of engagement is fairly comprehensive and relatively pragmatic; it seeks to promote gradual revolutionary change by influencing broad ranges of 'progressive' forces in friendly southern Asian countries through cultural and economic diplomacy, as well as by directly assisting the national communist movements. The Soviet approach is more realistic and is supported by more resources. A change in the Asian balance due to a communist victory over the Saigon government and a contraction of the usa's security role in the region, however, could lead to more substantial gains for China than for the ussr. I The rivalry between the ussr and China in the Third World during the early 1960s seemed to express negotiable differences regarding the