| This dissertation is a study of the breakdown in relations between China and Indonesia, between October 1965 and October 1967, the early years of the Cultural Revolution and the Gestapu coup and countercoup. During that most tumultuous period in each Republic's short history, China and Indonesia each lost relations with only one major diplomatic partner: the other. Foreign Ministers Chen Yi and Dr. H. Subandrio, along with their ministries, came under repeated, violent, domestic attack. They were toppled and their foreign affairs systems thrown into severe disarray through radical, politically motivated, attacks and purges. Activist student groups in each country attacked the other nation's resident diplomatic facilities and personnel.; Despite China's severely strained relations around the world the PRC managed to hold on to its ties with its other major partners. Indonesia, with an increasingly broad anti communist national program characterized by the Suharto New order regime's decimation of the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, continued its relations with all of its other communist diplomatic partners.; This study uses Indonesian and Chinese internal government materials, as well as other Chinese and Indonesian language sources, to explore the cataclysmic domestic situations which played themselves out in their foreign relations.; Taking a different approach than earlier accounts, this dissertation views the breakdown in relations from both sides through their own words, but also with the use of U.S. and British declassified documents, and other reference materials, to provide depth from third party perspectives. The use of memoirs of recently released political prisoners, and other first-hand accounts, combined with my translations of the contents of diplomatic notes between the two nations, all serve to challenge conventionally held views of the break in relations: that the split was inevitable, that China and the PKI were mainly responsible, that the Indonesian student attacks were spontaneous, that the Indonesian Chinese brought about the breakup, and other popularly held impressions. Simultaneous disorder in both the domestic and foreign affairs scenes played the predominant role in the final freeze, or suspension, in relations in October 1967 which would last for nearly a quarter of a century. |
