The Chinese civil war 1927-49 was the first regional Cold War conflict. It pitted the internationally recognized Republican government of the Nationalist Party against the Chinese Communist Party. Although by 1945 China was elevated to great power status as a member of the United Nation Security Council, it was internally weak. Neither the nationalists nor the communists had significantly contributed to the end of imperialism in China by 1945. With the Nationalist defeat in 1949, the communists provided the country with a stable government for the first time in a century. However, during the following quarter of a century, their leaders were unable to agree on external and domestic policies. Should China aim at revolutionizing the international system, or seek a place in it through membership in the United Nations? Should the PRC introduce a utopian socialist society at home, or pursue sound socio-economic development policies? The failures of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the successes of capitalist Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, and PRC membership in the United Nations eventually convinced Chinese leaders to forego revolution by the 1970s.

India’s foreign policy in the regional Asian Cold War mainly dealth with the territorial disagreement with its two largest neighbors. The country fought three wars with Pakistan over Kashmir and Bangladesh, and one with China over Himalayan borders. The four conflicts between 1947 and 1971 and the rapprochement between its two hostile neighbors in the 1960s forced India to forego one after another of its foundational principles: the pursuit of a policy of peace, the renunciation of a large standing army and nuclear weapons, and the elevation of internationalism over its own national interests. In international politics, Delhi also gave up its equidistance to Washington and Moscow by signing a Friendship Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1971 and by recognizing communist North Vietnam in 1972. While India in the early 1950s had enjoyed much public admiration in the Socialist Camp, the Free World, and the decolonizing Global South for its principled foreign policy and internal political system, it re-emerged in the 1970s as an internationally isolated giant with its democracy in tatters and its domestic body politic frayed.