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When victory in the civil war (1946-49) seemed near, the Chinese Communist Party defined a first series of important directives for the future foreign policy of the People’s Republic. This paper considers such directives in the tense international context which accompanied the creation of the new state, delineating in particular the complex web of relations between Chinese Communists, the Soviet Union, the United States of America, and the United Nations. During the years of the Cold War a strongly polarised world-view prevented the identification of the specific historical and even cultural choices that the Chinese made at the time; this essay tries to reconstruct these, identifying, on the one hand, roots that lie in the past, and, on the other, their continued relevance for China’s foreign policy today. This essay is based, amongst other things, on the most recent and authoritative Chinese historical sources, archival sources on the US, and on historiography in both Western languages and in Chinese.