The rise of Sukarno in Indonesia and his effective dominance over foreign policy provided the opportunity for the PRC to develop a relationship that had seemed to be going badly awry only a year earlier. The Chinese in 1959 had protested angrily at the way in which the Indonesian army carried out a government decree that in effect prohibited Chinese from engaging in retail trade outside of the main cities. The Chinese government went so far as to arrange the transport of tens of thousands of the traders to China. At one point the Chinese foreign minister was said to have warned his Indonesian counterpart, who had come to Beijing to settle matters by diplomacy, that ‘if Indonesia did not rescind its anti-Chinese measures, Peking would call on the Singapore Chinese to launch a trade boycott to bring Indonesia economically to its knees’. In the event, mindful of a possible Soviet interest in exploiting the issue as Khrushchev visited Jakarta in February 1960, the PRC backed down, only to find that it was fortunate in the rise of Sukarno. Given his emphasis on the significance of the so-called new emerging forces, the relatively conservative image of Soviet Union that emerged from the public polemics of the Sino-Soviet dispute made Sukarno favour China after the success of the West Irian campaign in late 1962 and the onset of his campaign of confrontation with Malaysia in early 1963. When Sukarno withdrew in pique from the United Nations in 1965 and threatened to establish an alternative body he found a ready response in Beijing.