During the 1970s, the People's Republic of China under the leadership of its founder, Mao Zedong, argued that a belligerent attitude should be maintained towards capitalist countries, and so initially rejected the peaceful coexistence theory as essentially Marxist revisionism.
From that point through the early 1980s and the adoption of Socialism with Chinese characteristics, China increasingly extended its own peaceful coexistence concept to include all nations.
Peaceful coexistence was meant to assuage Western, capitalist concerns that the socialist Soviet Union was driven by the concept of world revolution advocated by its founders, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
[citation needed] In addition to being a reaction to the realization that a nuclear war between the two superpowers would ensure the destruction of not only the socialist system but the entirety of humanity, it also reflected the USSR's strategic military disposition - the move away from large, and possibly politically offensive, military ventures towards a force centered on proxy wars and a strategic nuclear missile force.
Although disquiet over this shift helped bring Khrushchev down, his successors did not return to the antagonistic contradiction theories of an inevitable conflict between the capitalist and socialist systems.
As a leader in the Cuban government during the October Missile Crisis, Guevara believed that a repeat invasion by the United States (after the Bay of Pigs) would be justifiable grounds for a nuclear war.
One major consequence of this policy was that the PRC would not support Communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand and Malaysia, and would distance itself from overseas Chinese in those nations.
Second, the Chinese concept of peaceful coexistence places a large emphasis on national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and thus moves by the United States to promote its interests are seen in this framework as hostile.