Coming to Terms with the People’s Republic of China: Jawaharlal Nehru in the Early 1950s

This chapter examines the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s (1889–1964) assessments on the nature of the Chinese Communist revolution and the state it created in the early 1950s. It argues that two interlocking sets of considerations informed the Nehru government’s approach to the newly founded People’s Republic of China (PRC). One consideration was pragmatic, reckoning that the government headquartered in Beijing was well-functioning and stable. India was not in a position to ignore or antagonize its giant eastern neighbour. The other consideration was explicitly ideological; it sees the PRC as the culmination of a nationalist project with which India identified. The PRC was, as far as Nehru was concerned, undergoing a period of moderate socialist reconstruction, akin to India’s postcolonial experiment. The chapter compares, homing in on New Dehli’s and Beijing’s reactions to the Korean crisis, Nehru’s ruminations on domestic socioeconomic development and Asian independence and those of Chinese leaders such as Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Song Qingling (1893–1981). It observes that while there were significant differences between the two states, they shared an anticolonial internationalism that laid the groundwork for solidarity between the two countries and paved the way for the celebrated Bandung Conference in August 1955.