In a very influential and frequently cited article published twenty-five years ago, William Kirby compellingly argued that Chinese history before 1949 was defined and shaped by the nature of its foreign interactions.1 This would appear to be all the more true of China under Communist rule in the 1950s. If the Guomindang regime styled itself “Nationalist” in English, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was, from its conception, internationalist in premise and in promise. Indeed, when Mao Zedong declared that the Chinese people had finally “stood up” with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949, he made it clear that they would not stand alone but would stand by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its allies.2 Stalin and Mao may often have been “uncertain partners,”3 but the People’s Republic of China in its formative years would be Moscow’s most faithful and self-sacrificing ally, a distinction earned in blood in Korea and by the fact that, unlike the Eastern European “people’s democracies,” the PRC’s allegiance was not bought at gunpoint.