The Bandung Conference: Triumph of Diplomacy

Abstract

When the Bandung Conference of Asian and African Nations met in April of 1955, the Korean War had been brought to an inconclusive ending two years earlier, The Korean peninsula remained divided, and there was no peace treaty between the warring parties, which included the People's Republic of China, The following year, 1954, the French were routed at Dienbienphu just as a great-power conference got under way in Geneva to decide the future of Vietnam, The pace of de-colonization in Asia and Africa was a subject of overriding interest to the delegates at Bandung, many of whom had experienced the sting of colonialism in a very personal way, But the United States saw the conference mainly as a threat to American interests largely because of the inclusion of Communist China as a participant. When the weeklong conference ended one diplomat was widely acclaimed as its preeminent statesman, credited with the remarkable feat of turning this unrehearsed, one-of-a kind diplomatic venture into an unqualified success: Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China, That was all the more remarkable because Zhou had, in all probability, been the target of a bungled American assassination plot, and he was intensely conscious of it, Zhou's quiet accomplishments at the Bandung Conference were, to be sure, a credit to his embattled regime back in Beijing, whose human rights violations continued to inspire scorn abroad, But, just as importantly, Zhou' s political skills were a powerful vindication of mature diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy.