The politics of resistance: Mao Zedong’s perspective on the politics of ‘the third world countries’ in the 1950s and a review of post-cold war narrative of cold war history

Abstract

The conventional narrative of cold war history is an ideological product of the post-cold war politics. It orients around the axis of the completion for hegemony between two superpowers, namely the USA and the Soviet Union. This narrative fails to reflect the historical and political significances of the national independent movements among the socalled the “third world countries” in shaping today’s world order. It neither can provide a theoretical and historical contextualisation for the political transition began in the 1990s. This research intends to demonstrate that in order to understand today’s “politics of depoliticization”, it is important to reveal the historical continuity connecting the historical of colonial expansion in 19th century, cold war history of decolonisation, and national independence movement in the short 20th century in general. By analysing the Chinese foreign policy and political narrative relating to the Egyptian and Syrian national independence movement in the 1950s, this article will try to demystify the traditional narrative of the Cold War. It will also elaborate the historical importance of the “third world countries” as an essential independent “third power”, which enriches the political meanings of national independence and anti-colonial resistance in the context of ideological politics in the Cold War period. This article wants to emphasise that without carefully evaluating the historical and political value of the national independence movements in “short 20th century”, we could not truly understand the problematic of today’s issue of terrorism, anti-terrorist war, and the political turmoil in the Arab world