The spirit of Bandung is driving a process of change unseen in a century.

Speech to the webinar “The Bandung spirit lives on! Unity against imperialism, and the struggle for a multipolar world”, organised by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group. 27 April 2025.

 

Thank you, Comrades.

We called this meeting to celebrate the 70^th anniversary of the Bandung Conference and to affirm its continued relevance.

What do I mean by that?

It was a key moment in the evolution and development of the international situation post-World War 2.

It came at the cusp of the anti-imperialist national liberation movement:

• Just after the liberation of China, itself preceded by the independence of India, Pakistan, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma (now Myanmar).
• When Korea and Indochina were at the forefront of the global diplomatic agenda – this being the year after the 1954 Geneva Conference.
• Just prior to the great wave of decolonisation in Africa, to begin with the independence of Ghana from British colonial rule, under the leadership of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in March 1957, followed by the independence of Guinea from French colonial rule, under the leadership of Ahmed Sekou Toure, in October 1958.
• And with the world waking up to the full iniquity of the apartheid regime being progressively consolidated – with newly independent India having been the first country to raise the question at the United Nations.

It was against this backdrop that Bandung established a distinct and common Africa Asia identity as a political concept and geopolitical reality.

Of course, there were antecedents, to a great extent related to the international communist movement and to actually existing socialism:

• The Communist International had convened the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in September 1920.
• In 1927, again at the instigation of the Communist International, delegates including Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Song Qingling (Mme. Sun Yat-Sen) from China, and indeed Fenner Brockway from Britain’s Independent Labour Party, had gathered in Brussels to found the League Against Imperialism.
• And in 1945, Manchester hosted the fifth Pan African Congress, attended by three future African heads of state – Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Hastings Banda of Malawi – along with the African-American scholar and revolutionary Dr. WEB Du Bois, who had attended the first congress in Paris in 1919, and Amy Ashwood Garvey, the widow of Marcus Garvey.

But Bandung occurred at a qualitatively different historical moment in that it was an initiative of independent sovereign states – and in the main of newly independent sovereign states that had just set out on the road of building a new society. They therefore represented what both Indonesian President Sukarno, the host of the conference, and Korean leader Kim Il Sung referred to as the new emerging forces.

Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, the Non-Aligned Movement was not founded at Bandung. But it was the Spirit of Bandung – encapsulated in its 10 Principles, themselves inspired by the Charter of the United Nations and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which I shall mention a little later – and the political momentum it unleashed that led directly to the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in September 1961, following a preparatory meeting in Cairo in June of that year.

Indeed, it can be said that all the major institutions created and now being qualitatively developed by the Global South, the Global Majority, must be understood as standing on the shoulders of the Bandung pioneers.

It should also be noted that, compared to later and current understandings of the Global South, or the Third World, or the Tricontinent, Bandung was eponymously an Africa Asia gathering. Although Brazil was present as an observer, it took the Cuban socialist revolution of 1959 for this burgeoning global movement to decisively embrace Latin America.

It was not only the representatives of independent states that sent observers to Bandung. In keeping with its historical juncture, it also welcomed representatives of peoples still struggling for their independence, including Archbishop Makarios, the first President of independent Cyprus.

The South African liberation movement, led by the African National Congress, sent Moses Kotane, the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, and Moulvi Cachalia, a leader of the South African Indian Congress. They were joined by representatives of the independence movements of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.

Early suggestions that Israel might be invited as an Asian nation were rebuffed and Palestine, facilitated by the delegation from Yemen, was represented by Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin el-Husseini, this being prior to the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

China’s Premier and then Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai’s meeting with the Grand Mufti gave significant impetus to the forging of China-Palestine friendship and to creating the long history of China’s solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Indeed, and obviously this is particularly important for us as Friends of Socialist China, another absolutely seminal aspect of the Bandung Conference was the central role played by Zhou Enlai.

Zhou had, of course, been a key leader of the Chinese revolution since the early 1920s. By 1955, he was well known to the socialist camp and the international communist movement. But it was in 1954-1955 that he started to truly become known to the world as a brilliant statesperson and diplomat and a man of profound intellect, magnanimity, charisma, and charm.

The previous year he had formulated the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence – which were, as mentioned, integrated into the Bandung Principles – together with Indian Prime Minister Nehru and the leaders of Burma.

And he had attended the Geneva Conference, called to discuss the questions of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Korea, where US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles famously refused to shake his outstretched hand, but where he befriended Charlie Chaplin and met with the future British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

It was not a given that Zhou Enlai would be welcomed in Bandung. In 1949, Chairman Mao had proclaimed that the new China’s foreign policy would be one of ‘leaning to one side’, meaning aligning with the USSR and the socialist camp. The great majority of states represented at Bandung had yet to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic. (Some did not do so for decades.) Some were fiercely anti-communist, were actively fighting communism at home, were fearful of New China, and concerned that it might seek to actively foment revolution in their own countries.

Zhou nearly didn’t make it to Bandung as he was the intended victim of an assassination attempt that took the lives of 16 of the 19 passengers aboard the Kashmir Princess airline on which he was believed to be travelling.

Zhou Enlai’s disarming charm and his emphasis on what united the newly emerging forces, rather than what divided them, secured not only his enduring place in the political life of the Global South, but also the central place and key role of Socialist China, something that becomes ever more manifest with each passing day six decades later.

The transition from mistrust and suspicion to respect and affection for Premier Zhou at Bandung may in fact be said to embody its essence and dialectic.

Nowadays, there are some good comrades who say that the spirit of Bandung is dead. That Bandung was political, but the BRICS are merely economic and have yet to rise to the position of being political. And so on.

This school of thought strikes me as a little odd.

First, it is generally accepted in the Marxist movement that politics is the most concentrated expression of economics – as Lenin put it, for example in his 1920 speech, The Trade Unions, the present situation, and Trotsky’s mistakes.

So, the alleged dichotomy seems a somewhat false one. Are not the present ‘tariff wars’ economic in form but entirely political in essence?

Secondly, Bandung occurred at the height of the anti-colonial revolution. The very purpose of that revolution was to enable and empower countries and peoples to embark on the road of building a new society, developing their independent national economies and improving their people’s livelihood.

Now that colonialism, in its classic form, has very largely, if not entirely, been extirpated from the face of the earth, it should scarcely be surprising that the focus of attention should turn increasingly to economic matters.

The idea of a revolutionary Bandung but a reformist, at best, BRICS is further belied by looking at who actually gathered in the Indonesian city.

Yes, Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam was there. But so was the puppet regime in Saigon.

So was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Shah’s Iran.

Even Japan was there. Today, no gathering specifically of the Global South would set a place at the table for Japan.

In his November 10, 1963, Message to the Grass Roots, Malcolm X summed up Bandung as follows:

In Bandung back in, I think, 1954, was the first unity meeting in centuries of black people. And once you study what happened at the Bandung conference, and the results of the Bandung conference, it actually serves as a model for the same procedure you and I can use to get our problems solved. At Bandung all the nations came together, the dark nations from Africa and Asia. Some of them were Buddhists, some of them were Muslims, some of them were Christians, some were Confucianists, some were atheists. Despite their religious differences, they came together. Some were communists, some were socialists, some were capitalists – despite their economic and political differences, they came together.

So, this is the thread that leads from Bandung to BRICS – a thread of linear progression and of quantitative and qualitative development.

The spirit of Bandung is indeed alive and, with Socialist China at its core, is now driving a process of change unseen in a century, with the rise of the Global South and the inexorable progression towards multipolarity.

Thank you for your attention.