A research article by Luka Renić
Edited and with additional research by Raphael Angieri
Introduction
From the early years of its founding until the mid-1970s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursued a revolutionary foreign policy across Africa and Asia, one characterized by support for communist, left-wing, and nationalist movements, not least in the Arab world.
Among other things, Beijing sought thereby to build a “united front” of socialist nations, first to combat the “main enemy” of Western imperialism, and then, following the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, to counter the “social imperialism” of the Soviet Union as well.
Chinese efforts to align diverse revolutionary actors from Asia and Africa into a cohesive non-Soviet socialist “Third World” formation were met, at best, with partial success.1 Amidst fierce competition from the United States and Soviet Union for influence in the post-colonial world, even China’s most ideologically like-minded partners adopted strategic agendas balancing multiple sources of patronage. Outmatched materially by its superpower rivals and constrained by the domestic upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, Beijing ultimately curtailed its support for revolutionary movements abroad and reoriented toward more conventional diplomacy.
Chinese relations with the historical state of South Yemen (1967-1990) offer a particularly revealing perspective on the evolution—and eventual limits—of the PRC’s revolutionary socialist-internationalist project as it played out in the decolonizing Arab world.
Starting from the mid-1960s, Beijing provided material aid and political guidance to anti-colonial forces in southern Yemen, helping lay the foundations for close ties with the post-independence South Yemeni state and turning Aden into a conduit for Chinese coordination with revolutionary movements across Arabia and the Mideast. Yet South Yemen consistently leveraged Chinese assistance alongside that of the Soviet Union, pursuing a strategy of hedging that frustrated Beijing’s preference for exclusive partnership. As China moderated its revolutionary foreign policy over the course of the 1970s, and as South Yemen deepened its reliance on Moscow, the China-South Yemen relationship correspondingly lost much of its geopolitical centrality.
This paper explores China-South Yemen relations as a critical node of Sino-Arab interaction in the post-colonial period, analyzing engagement between the PRC and history’s only Marxist Arab state through the prism of small-country agency within Chinese ambitions of leadership in a socialist Third World project.
China’s Mideast Outreach, from Above and Below
Emerging with revolutionary credibility but limited diplomatic recognition after a conclusive victory in the Chinese Civil War (1927-1949) and mitigated success in the materially costly “War to Resist America and Aid Korea” (1950-1953), Mao Zedong’s newly communist China turned in the 1950s toward the rapidly decolonizing Afro-Asian world to expand its reach and influence. Following a series of accords with East and South Asian countries, Beijing initiated political engagement with Arab nations ‘from above,’ establishing relations in the mid-to-late 1950s with the nationalist governments of Egypt, Syria, North Yemen, and Iraq as these countries broke from colonial rule looking for partnerships.
Revolutionary activism suffused PRC diplomacy in this era, as visible across political and cultural initiatives. But by the mid-1960s, the socialist transition favored by China had failed to take place in Arab capitals. Rather, predominately left-leaning but decidedly non-communist regimes were consolidating throughout the region. Beijing thus began in parallel to foster ties ‘from below’ with revolutionary groups active in territories where nationalist struggles were ongoing and political conditions still malleable.2
Through arms provision and training programs in guerrilla warfare, Chinese communists leveraged their own revolutionary experience to support a number of left-wing insurgencies across the region, including the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY), an Egyptian-backed anti-colonial movement fighting alongside rival factions against British occupation.
With the launch of the Cultural Revolution in the spring of 1966, China’s dual-track, ‘above-and-below’ approach to Arab-world outreach gave way to a far more radical emphasis on spurring regional transformation by underwriting armed non-state actors. Indeed, Beijing all but suspended its conventional diplomacy, recalling all ambassadors save one in Cairo, while maintaining robust channels of material and ideological support for insurgent groups.
In the late 1960s, China’s regional engagement thus operated less through formal interstate relations than through vectors of revolutionary coordination, with zones of active nationalist or anti-imperialist struggle privileged over established post-colonial governments. It was within this increasingly militant framework that southern Arabia and the birth therein of a socialist South Yemeni state assumed heightened importance within Beijing’s regional strategy.
Revolutionary Partners: The People’s Republics of China and South Yemen
On 30 November 1967, four years into a full-scale insurgency—and on the heels of last-minute negotiations culminating in a full British withdrawal from Aden and the end of one hundred twenty-eight years of colonial occupation—the People’s Republic of South Yemen (PRSY) was proclaimed under the leadership of Qahtan al-Shaabi and his National Liberation Front (NLF), a left-wing revolutionary group that would manage the territory’s transition into statehood.
Already a locus of Chinese and Soviet revolutionary activities during its period of anti-colonial struggle, southern Yemen now became all the more critical within the calculus of the socialist powers as it witnessed the birth of a revolutionary state in a region where post-colonial regimes had yet to fully consolidate, notably in Oman and along the Arab Gulf.
Beijing moved swiftly to establish relations, reportedly sending a congratulatory message to al-Shaabi on the very day of independence. Formal diplomatic relations were established just a month later in January 1968, through the countries’ respective envoys in Cairo, Egypt, underscoring the importance Beijing attached to building ties with the fledgling state even as its conventional diplomacy remained largely compromised by the Cultural Revolution.
China sought to play an advisory role as the NLF transitioned from insurgent movement to governing party. During a rare foreign invitation to Beijing in September 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, a South Yemeni delegation was encouraged by Chinese representatives to avoid premature attempts to adopt full socialism and advised instead to focus on national development and regional alliance-building. The Chinese cautioned against overt Marxist ideological commitments that risked isolating South Yemen from partners in the Arab nationalist movement and fostering political dependency on the Soviet Union.3
These “brotherly consultations” were reinforced by material assistance. Of the USD 36 million in aid requested by the 1968 delegation, Beijing committed USD 12 million in the form of a ten-year interest-free loan, as well as military equipment for 5,000 combatants, composed of light weapons—rifles, machine guns, and anti-tank guns. Over the next years, the Chinese also contributed to a series of industrial, transport, and public infrastructure projects, including construction of a textile mill and hospital in the governorate of Aden, as well as several hundred miles of highway linking Aden to Mukalla in the Hadhramaut.
The presence of the Soviet Union expanded in South Yemen alongside that of the PRC, with a growing footprint across military, economic, and security sectors.4 Rather than align fully with either of the socialist giants, South Yemeni leaders were careful to cultivate fruitful relations with both, invoking socialist unity and treading softly to avoid provoking either party.
Aden’s Moment in the Sun: South Yemen as a Revolutionary Platform
In June 1969, far-left elements in South Yemen’s ruling party, led by the revolutionary figure Salim Rubaya Ali, seized power and deposed the country’s founding president, Qahtan al-Shaabi, initiating the country’s transformation from an Arab socialist state into a more radically Marxist-Leninist one, soon to be renamed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY).
While this abrupt reorientation of the regime, called the “Corrective Move,” was at variance with counsel offered a year earlier by members of Chinese leadership, Beijing nonetheless took the opportunity to deepen relations with South Yemen as the latter explicitly repositioned itself within the militant socialist camp. Under its new leadership, Aden actively forged a new role for itself as a platform for coordination between the socialist powers and revolutionary movements across the region.
South Yemen became a major node for China’s backing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), a Marxist insurgency based in Dhofar, Oman, which sought to depose the country’s British-backed monarchy and unite the whole of eastern Arabia—where China had no state-to-state relations at the time—under one socialist regime. Aden and nearby ports served as a channel for the transfer of Chinese arms into the region, as well as the transport of Omani militants to China for guerrilla and ideological training.
Intelligence agencies were attentive to this dynamic. In June 1971, the British Embassy in Aden reported that the ruling South Yemeni party was “clearly committed to the continued moral and material support of PFLOAG,” while internal CIA reports noted that the PRC’s New China News Agency (NCNA) was active in the South Yemeni capital, and the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) observed circulation of writings by Mao Zedong. The Omani embassy in London publicized in July 1973 that Omani security forces had uncovered a “large quantity” of exclusively Chinese-origin arms allegedly supplied to PFLOAG through South Yemen in 1972.
Aden also served as a point of contact for Chinese support to Arab leftist resistance groups beyond the Arabian Peninsula, notably the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), both of which maintained offices in Aden. In addition to inter-party consultations with the Chinese, members of the two groups reportedly received training at PRC-sponsored PFLOAG bases in South Yemen.
By the early 1970s, however, gaps had appeared between China and South Yemen, as the rollback of the most radical leftist policies of the Cultural Revolution—coinciding with China’s gradual normalization with the United States beginning in 1971 and accession to the United Nations in 1972—led to a moderation of its overt alignment with armed revolutionary struggle internationally and a return to conventional diplomacy.
From March to December 1971, China established diplomatic relations with Kuwait and recognized the oil-rich monarchies of Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, simultaneously pressuring PFLOAG to limit its aims to Oman rather than the entire Gulf region. By 1973, Britain’s FCO reported that Chinese support for PFLOAG had greatly diminished, with the last Aden-based New China communiqué backing the group reportedly issued in June 1972. PFLOAG’s own records reflect this trend; an August 1972 issue of Red Line notes in two terse lines the return of a PFLOAG delegation from “successful talks with our Chinese comrades” in Beijing, without noting any new commitments from the PRC.
With the decline of Chinese support for PFLOAG, South Yemen lost its role as a platform for Chinese revolutionary outreach, one of the pillars of the countries’ early relationship, even as South Yemen continued to grow closer to the Soviet Union. Soon, growing Soviet contributions eclipsed Beijing’s influence as a bilateral partner entirely. Between 1967 and 1980, Soviet economic aid to the PDRY reached USD 152 million, around one-third of all external assistance received over that period and almost double the USD 84 million total from China. Contemporaneous CIA intelligence, since declassified, puts the value of military hardware sent by the Soviet Union to South Yemen from 1968 to 1980 at USD 880 million, with half of that arriving just in the period 1979-80.
As these disparities in external assistance widened, divisions appeared within the South Yemeni leadership which would ultimately prove fatal to the relationship with the PRC. While President Salim Rubaya Ali, a committed member of the Maoist camp, sought to preserve close relations with China even as the latter drew down support, his rival, Abd al-Fattah Ismail, favored adopting a Soviet-led development model and security arrangement. With Beijing scaling back its revolutionary commitments in the Arabian Peninsula and Soviet assistance continuing to expand, these internal divisions intensified, culminating in a 1978 coup d’état which would eliminate Ali, consolidate the pro-Soviet faction, and decisively curtail Chinese influence in South Yemen.
Conclusion
China-South Yemen relations offer a revealing portrait of how China’s Mao-era revolutionary Third Worldist foreign policy evolved and was superseded as its global ambitions encountered the strategic autonomy of post-colonial partners amidst competition with the Soviet Union.
Initially conceived in Beijing as part of a broader effort to construct a non-Soviet socialist united front, cooperation with South Yemen enabled China to project revolutionary influence in Arabia and beyond through Aden’s active role as a regional hub for insurgent movements. Yet the relationship also revealed the limits of Chinese internationalism. South Yemeni leaders leveraged Chinese assistance alongside Soviet support, pursuing a strategy of hedging that constrained Beijing’s preference for exclusive partnership. As Soviet military and economic dominance grew and Chinese foreign engagement in the early 1970s shifted towards conventional state-to-state diplomacy, particularly in the Gulf region, Aden’s value as a revolutionary platform diminished, and the Soviets emerged as the South Yemeni state’s main partner.
Sino-South Yemeni relations cooled not as a result of a hard rupture on the ideological front, but because the strategic logic that had sustained close cooperation gradually eroded. This case thus illustrates how post-colonial revolutionary states shaped and ultimately circumscribed the reach of Mao-era internationalism, even where ideological affinity appeared strongest.
By the time South Yemen failed as a socialist project, unifying in 1990 with its neighbor to the north, the Yemen Arab Republic, amidst the Soviet Union’s disintegration, China had long abandoned the socialist-internationalist foreign policy that first drew it to Aden, replacing revolutionary activism with more regime-agnostic diplomacy across the Gulf region and wider Mideast.
Luka Renić is an Arabist and researcher specializing in inter-communal relations, civil society actors, and socio-legal frameworks in contexts of political transition and state-building in the Mideast and North Africa region. He holds an M.A. in Law from the University of Zagreb and an M.A. in Political Science from Saint Joseph University in Beirut. Luka is currently based in Cairo, Egypt, where he works as an editor and researcher with Dialogue Across Borders.
Works referenced:
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- The term “Third World” refers here to a framework articulated by Mao Zedong in a series of early-1970s foreign policy statements. Mao sought coordination among formerly colonized states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (what he called the “Third World”) against the hegemony of the United States and the Soviet Union (“First World”), with the industrialized countries of Europe considered antagonistic middle powers (“Second World”). For examples of usage by Mao, see Song Yongyi, ed. Jimi dang’an zhong xinfaxian de Mao Zedong jianghua [Newly Discovered Speeches of Mao Zedong in Secret Archives]. Hong Kong: Guoshi Chubanshe, 2018.
- The framing of a two-pronged Chinese strategy to build a socialist united front ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ is drawn from Shai Har-El’s reading of scholarship by W.A.C. Adies, as cited in Har-El, Shai. 2024. China and the Palestinian Organizations: 1964-1971. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
- For a complete record of the South Yemeni delegation’s 1968 meetings with Chinese officials in Beijing, see Behbehani, Hashim S. H. (ed.) 1985. China and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen: A Report. London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henley: Kegan Paul International Ltd.
- A comparison of PRC and Soviet assistance to South Yemen over this period is presented in detail by Halliday, Fred. 1990. Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen, 1967-1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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