This article explores the impact of the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 on official and unofficial Sino-Iranian relations. In China, commentary about Iran became a mainstay of CCP propaganda and drew on Pan-asian themes. In Iran, two competing visions of China emerged in the pages of newspapers, magazines, and travelogues, one espoused by the state, the other by its leftist critics. One saw the victory of Mao Zedong as an inspiration, while the other held up the fate of Chiang Kai-shek as a cautionary tale for Iran. Official ties between Iranian state and the Nationalist Republic of China, established in the 1920s, became increasingly visible to Iranian elites. At the same time, unofficial ties developed between the Chinese Communist Party and the Iranian Tudeh Party, primarily through networks of student activists. These ties laid the groundwork for the emergence of Iranian Maoism as an ideological force in the 1960s. My project intervenes in this growing discourse on Sino-Iranian relations by shifting focus to social history. Inspired by Elizabeth Wynne Russell's work on diplomacy and identity, it explores the mutual influence between official and unofficial forms of Sino-Iranian interaction rather than reinforcing a dichotomy between them. State-to-state connections are examined alongside a parallel trajectory of ties, visits, and relations far less covered and documented in conventional literature, between Leftist trends among the Iranian opposition and the Chinese state at the height of the Cold War. Both the state and the opposition used international relations and the 1949 Chinese Revolution as a medium to advance competing visions of Iranian identity and the meaning of both Anti-Communist and Socialist internationalism. International conferences in Beijing, open letters on China-Iran relations, newspaper articles, and travelogues about China were linked to domestic debates about the future of Iranian society. I argue that these events set the stage for important developments among both state and opposition forces in the 1960s and 1970s, when relations with China impacted the direction and strategy of the Pahlavi state and its militant opposition. This approach foregrounds a set of relations that until now was considered mainly background to the larger drama of Sino-Iranian state-to-state interactions. A transnational framework emphasizes the global origins of the Iranian revolution and the international context in which it developed. Focusing on the external rather than internal factors that impacted the Iranian opposition highlights how the Iranian revolution played out across international borders.

Iranians actively took part in the Vietnam War on the both sides. Under Shah, Iran even sent pilots and ground forces to fight in Vietnam. On the other side of the war, the Iranian revolutionary opposition staunchly backed the North Vietnamese side and often justified its position as part of support for decolonization. In the decade leading to the Iranian revolution of 1979, Vietnam was one of the main topics of intellectual engagement and political propaganda. How to make sense of the Iranian contributions to a conflict so far away? Iranians’ approach to the Vietnam War clearly made sense as part of the Cold War. Shah’s staunch anti-communism meant that its backing of the US in the Cold War wasn’t just based on geopolitical concerns but had a serious ideological component. At the same time, Shah’s intervention in the conflict wasn’t straightforwardly pro-American and had elements of autonomy. The Iranian state-controlled press didn’t took up the cause of the South Vietnam and its coverage sometimes verged on being anti-war. Iran’s own military contribution to the war was kept hidden and Iran was much more enthusiastic in offering help to international mediation efforts. Tehran also criticized the US conduct of the war and attempted different channels to help bring it to an end: this included Shah’s discussions with Nicolae Ceaușescu, leader of Romania; and the Iranian diplomats using their cultural links with the French Communist Party as a back-channel to Hanoi. For the Iranian opposition, the anti-colonial aspect of the war, and its portrayal as a continuation of Vietnam’s war against the French, was often emphasized. Vietnam was one of the global questions that helped unite the opposition despite widely different takes on the Cold War that pitted different strands of leftists, nationalists and Islamists against one another. After the victory of the Islamic Revolution and suppression of the left, many on the left justified their socialism by reminding their Islamist rulers that they had all once backed Vietnamese communists together. By a study of Iranian contributions to the Vietnam War, this paper highlights the south-to-south connections that animated the Iranians’ participation in the global Cold War. It argues that Iranians on both sides of the conflict (Shah and the opposition) were independent actors in Cold War’s intersection with decolonization and made meaningful contributions that are often elided in superpower-focused narratives.

Placeholder AbstractEgypt’s relationship with the Non-Aligned Movement was deeply interlinked with its attempt to increase its status in the Middle East in particular and in the world at large. Although the royal government until 1952 and the military regime afterward toyed with various forms of neutralism, Nasser bought into the Nehruvian conception of Non-Alignment only by 1956 after talks with Yugoslavia’s Tito. Both Nasser and Tito pushed, against Nehru’s opposition, for five years to establish the Non-Aligned Movement. However, the Non-Aligned Movement was quickly drawn into the quicksand of both world and Middle East politics. Its foundational conference in Belgrade in 1961 was overshadowed by the Berlin Crisis and the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing. The 2nd conference in Cairo in 1964 served Nasser to escape its isolation in the Middle East. The Israel-Arab war in June 1967 almost lead to a quasi-alliance between the socialist world and the Non-Aligned Movement. The 1970 conference in Lusaka was overshadowed by Black September in Jordan, which caused Arab leaders to skip it in favor of an Arab League emergency meeting in Cairo, after which Nasser suddenly died. His successor Sadat moved Egypt from a pro-Soviet to a pro-American position in the early 1970s in order to engage in some form of talks for a modus vivendi with Israel, just as the Cuba and then North Korea and unified socialist Vietnam was trying to seize the Non-Aligned Movement and move it towards the revolutionary, anti-American left. While the Egyptian-Israeli peace in 1979 led to Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab League, the moderates in the Non-Aligned Movement prevented a similar development in that movement. Still, Non-Aligned indecision during the 3rd Indochina War (1978-79), the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (1979-88), and the Iraq-Iran War (1980-88) estranged Egypt from its own creation—the Non-Aligned Movement.