It is common knowledge that in 1959 Mao Zedong said: "Our goal is the whole wide world . .. where we will create a mighty state" and that in 1965 he presented China with the task of "absolutely getting hold of Southeast Asia" in the near future. And today, far from disavowing these and similar statements, Peking uses them as a guide. Politics, propaganda and armed force combine to further Maoist foreign policy doctrines, in a range of ploys which extends from historical fabrications and the publication of maps showing the "lost Chinese lands" to armed provocation and outright aggression against neighbouring states......
A maiden work of this order was Su Yen-tsung's The General Tendency of the Modification of China's Borders, [249"¢22 which was published shortly after the Hsinhai revolution. Coming after it, Hua Chi-yun's China's Borders [249"¢23 gained wide currency. Indeed, its author, possibly the Kuomintang's leading authority in the field, completed his treatise in the spring of 1930, shortly after the Kuomintang provocations on the Chinese Eastern Railway, the raids on Soviet territory, and the rupture of SovietChinese relations. Hua Chi-yun's conceptions, which reflected the official moods.
Hua Chi-yun advocated the thesis of the need to "return" to China the lands it had "lost". He claimed that "China's old borders" had embraced vast territories extending from Kamchatka to Singapore and from Lake Balkhash to the Philippines. Korea, Burma, Vietnam, and Bhutan were seen as "conceded tributaries", which had been within the "old borders". Considerable tracts of Soviet Far Eastern territory along with the Island of Sakhalin, part of Kazakhstan and the Soviet Central Asian republics, sections of Afghan and Indian territory, and the Ryukyu Archipelago were also included among China's "losses". The Mongolian People's Republic was generally ignored as a sovereign state and was designated as within China's contemporary borders. Maritime boundaries stretched hundreds and thousands of miles away from the mainland, taking in the islands of the East China and South China Seas. The special map appended to the chapter, "Revision of Frontiers and Lost 250 Territories", illustrated this projected programme of territorial aggrandisement.
http://libweb.uoregon.edu/ec/e-asia/read/PRO.pdf
