A generation ago, men of divergent personal appearance, political experience, and cultural inheritance ascended to political leadership in the Third World and decided to embrace a transcendent secular radicalism. Whatever their inherited differences, they hoped to construct a united front against the First World and all its evil works, and thereby gain standing for themselves and power for their countries. This was an ambitious project, for as partisans of a broadly-conceived Third World they would need to submerge intramural rivalries of religion, race, culture and conquest into a vocabulary of left-wing solidarity that had been devised by and intended for Europeans.
China invested heavily in this undertaking, for there seemed to be good possibilities in it. The old China-that is to say, mere Imperial or Republican China-could not have imagined the extension of its influence into so much of this world. The ambitions of Imperial China had certainly been great and its confidence in its own universalism highly developed. It was also long-accustomed to being the richest and most powerful country in the world. Even more, Confucianism, China's homegrown ideology, was integral to the growth and consolidation of China's influence in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. But the New Thinking of New China-Communist and Maoist China-carried even grander ambitions to make China a force in places where it had never before been well-established. Among those were the core countries of that other great non-European center of culture and power, the Islamic world. This was an improbable development, perhaps, but one made at least conceivable by the Cold War's admixture of geopolitics and ideology.
