This chapter makes the point that there is no need to go as far back as pre-modern Cambodian and pre-modern Vietnamese and Chinese histories to describe the well-documented hostile feelings between the Cambodians and Vietnamese, and that of Vietnam and China. The narrative thus begins during the period in which many of the main protagonists in the Third Indochina War were already active in the arena of the conflict.

In Mao’s China (1949–1976), coal shortage limited industrialization and economic growth. Under the conditions of a Western embargo, the adoption of Soviet mining technology in accordance with the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance (1950) was the only choice when the Chinese coal mining industry was predominantly manual and needed mechanization to increase its output.

The Soviet and Chinese documents examined in this chapter from 1956 to 1965 on Sino-Soviet co-operation in science and technology in the coal industry reveal a genuine sense of fraternal co-operation but different managerial cultures within the socialist ecumene, with not only different expectations but also different ways of doing things and very different resource bases. This chapter provides new insights into China’s position in the Eastern Bloc and vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The findings confound our understanding of this period as one of deep ideological hostility on the part of the PRC party-state toward the capitalist West, showing instead that in international trade and co-operation, the priority was not ideology but rather economic development.

This chapter reveals the popular origins of the Nixon-Mao summit. It argues that people-to-people diplomacy and nonstate actors made a fundamental contribution to the beginning of Sino-American rapprochement in 1971. Private US organizations – chief among them the National Committee on US-China Relations – helped change American minds about the need for engagement with the People’s Republic of China. Thereafter, people-to-people interactions were the first means by which direct contact between China and the United States resumed—through ping-pong diplomacy but also a raft of other 1971 visits by American scientists, students, and ideologically-motivated travelers. This chapter also analyzes the impression formed of China by some of the first American visitors to the country since the Cultural Revolution. It concludes with the negotiations over the structure of the exchange program that took place between the Chinese government and US state and nonstate actors in 1971 and 1972, including during the Nixon–Mao summit of February 1972.

The high watermark in the Sino-American relationship during the Henry Kissinger era came in 1973 with the creation of “liaison offices,” or de facto embassies, in each capital: These liaison offices further deepened and formalized the diplomatic relationship after the Richard Nixon–Mao Zedong summit of 1972 and would remain the closest that the two governments would come to establishing official diplomatic relations before Kissinger left government in January 1977. This chapter reveals that – in cause, conception, and execution – liaison offices were a direct outgrowth of the exchange relationship. Other new milestones in that relationship were also set in 1973, not least during the visit of the largest cultural delegation yet to travel to the People’s Republic of China: the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, 1973 also saw the first signs of new tensions in exchange diplomacy as lingering Sino-American disagreements about Cambodia and Taiwan, as well as turbulent Chinese domestic politics, led to confrontations in cultural contacts and during a Congressional delegation to China led by Senator Warren Magnuson.

The visit by the US table tennis team to China in April 1971 famously helped break the ice between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States. Less well known is the second leg of ping-pong diplomacy, in which the US and Chinese teams faced off again – in the United States. This was nonetheless an historic exchange: The Chinese team was the first official delegation of visitors from the PRC to ever visit the United States. This chapter shows how this successful sporting exchange helped transform Nixon and Mao’s secret diplomacy into a broader rapprochement between Chinese and US societies. It reveals how the success of the ping-pong return leg underpinned the successful effort by the hosts of the table tennis players – the National Committee on US-China Relations – to convince both the US and Chinese governments to recognize their organization and their allies at the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC as the foremost US conduits for managing exchanges with China. The chapter concludes with a connected development: the 1973 creation of a third private US organization to manage Sino-American societal interactions, the National Council for United States-China Trade.

Even at an abstract theoretical level, the power configuration in China after the 1969 9th Party Congress was highly unstable. On the one hand, Mao continued to be an active and powerful chairman of the party. On the other hand, Lin Biao, the anointed successor, had a great deal of control over the military. Without the possibility of other powerful factions in the party to check a potential fight between Mao and Lin, both sides had much temptation to eliminate the other if they believed they had sufficient power to do so (Acemoglu et al. 2008: 162). Fortunately for Mao, he had cultivated two disparate groups to help him govern China in the event of a purge of Lin Biao: the Fourth Front Army (FFA) and the surviving scribblers. Mao’s strategy of cultivating the tainted FFA paid off handsomely. Instead of having to concede to Lin Biao’s reluctance to carry out self-criticism or being forced to rely on Lin’s followers, Mao forced Lin’s hand, knowing that he could credibly threaten Lin with replacing the Lin Biao faction with FFA veterans. After Lin Biao fled, Mao carried out his threat and eradicated close associates of Lin Biao wholesale from the military, replacing them with veterans of the FFA. The Lin Biao incident on September 13, 1971, finally led to the full installation of the coalition of the weak.

Chapter Five discusses two things. First, it looks at the aftermath of the Futian Rebellion and at Xiang Ying’s efforts to calm things down. Xiang’s efforts were soon reversed by the arrival of the “three person group,” which implemented the radical new line coming out of the Comintern. Zhou Enlai would later try to control the sufan movement, but new leadership (Bo Gu) and the pressing need for soldiers and money would reignite efforts to suppress so-called counterrevolutionaries. Second, the chapter looks briefly at the Eyuwan Revolutionary Base Area, north of the Yangzi river, to show that the same logic of sufan applied there as well.

Chapter Three lays out Mao Zedong’s determination to build a revolutionary army. Party policy at the time argued for mobilizing the masses and the party leadership thought that Mao’s approach was too militaristic. Mao and Zhu De came into conflict over the scope of party control, and Mao was voted out. Zhou Enlai backed Mao, and he was restored to his position. The chapter ends with the Gutian Conference, at which Mao asserted his dominance over the military.