Bandung and the Third World: Historical Reference Points for Interpreting China’s Global South Narrative

This study analyzes how China, across the periods of revolution, the Cold War, and détente, appropriated the idea of the “Third World” both ideologically and materially. Although the Chinese Revolution emerged within and was structurally constrained by the U.S.–Soviet bipolar confrontation, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party persistently questioned the given logic of a world divided into East and West, thereby carving out an autonomous conceptual space that they termed the “intermediate zone.”<br/>The 1955 Bandung Conference provided the material juncture at which the notions of the “intermediate zone” and the “Third World” first converged. The subsequent trajectory—from the “intermediate zone thesis”, through the “two intermediate zones”, to “Three Worlds Theory”— embodied a complex dynamic of encounter, divergence, and refracted return vis-à-vis the Bandung Spirit led by the Colombo group.<br/>Examining this internal complexity is essential because it offers a historical reference points for understanding China’s contemporary endeavor to reassemble the heirs of Bandung under the banner of the Global South.