For more than half a century the foreign policy of the
People's Republic of China has been predicated on non-interference, respect for
the sovereignty of others, non-aggression and peaceful co-existence. These were
the principles set down by Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Peace Conference
in 1955.
Over the last six decades, while China has never explicitly
strayed from rhetorical support for those principles, it has frequently not
practised what it preached. In the late Mao period, it supported revolutionary
struggle in the developing world, and in 1979 made a clumsy border intervention
into Vietnam. Between 1949 and 1978, it experienced clashes with India, Russia
and, in Korea, with the US and the UN.