'China Marching with India': India's Cold War Advocacy for the People's Republic of China at the United Nations, 1949–1971

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Sino-Indian relations in the 1950s has emphasised cooperation, revising previous narratives of an inexorable march towards the 1962 border war. This paper reassesses that cooperation by focusing on India’s role as an intermediary between the unrecognised government in Beijing and the United Nations (UN). Chinese sources reveal that Sino-Indian cooperation over UN affairs was complicated by competing conceptions of how the decolonising world should fit into the international system and who should be at the helm. Despite such disagreements, the Cold War UN provided a setting where divergent post-colonial visions could be sublimated into meaningful international cooperation.