Translating the Socialist State: Cultural Exchange, National Identity, and the Socialist World in the Early PRC

The founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 marked not only the start of a profound transformation of the Chinese state institutions, the society, and the economy, but also the beginning of a monumental project to redefine the nature of the Chinese nation-state and its position in the world. The establishment of a new government was to give new meaning to the Chinese nation, in its own eyes, and in terms of its interaction with other nations. The politics of "leaning to one side (yi bian dao)," that had been agreed on in 1949,¹ meant that the PRC was conceived as a state in the broader framework of the "socialist camp" from its very first hour.² The integration of the PRC into an emerging socialist world that spanned half of the globe, from Berlin to Pyongyang, from Warsaw to Hanoi, and from Sofia to Novosibirsk—was a momentous event and gave legitimacy to the young regime that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was starting to build; it left an imprint on this regime for decades to come.

On the topmost plane of politics, the PRC's entry into the socialist camp was translated into a series of bilateral treaties that the Chinese government signed with other socialist nations, and with the Soviet Union in particular. These processes have been relatively well-researched.³ However, the institutionalization of China's cooperation with the socialist nations of Eastern Europe and Asia could be but a first step in the enormous project of redefining the Chinese nation-state. The next task for the CCP, arguably at least as important as winning diplomatic recognition from its new allies, was to reshape the nation's identity in the minds of its citizens. This new identity had to be both national and international; it was to define the nation-state and at the same time to transcend the national borders. To generate this kind of consciousness among the citizens of the nations in the socialist bloc was key to consolidating the new regimes—a task faced not only by the Chinese government, but by the other socialist nations as well. In this process, cultural factors played a key role, and a fundamental mechanism to create a feeling of cohesiveness and shared goals and values was the promotion of cultural exchanges.⁴

Soon after the founding of the PRC, the CCP thus began to set up a network of contacts and institutions entrusted with fostering exchanges in the cultural field designed to anchor the PRC firmly in the socialist camp. The government set out to build a cultural diplomacy that would assist and complement the PRC's efforts on the high-level diplomatic fronts and would penetrate deep into the populace to instill identity politics in the people's minds. In contrast to the formation of foreign policy in the early PRC, these efforts in cultural diplomacy have received surprisingly little scholarly attention.⁵ This article is an effort to explore some of the institutional dimensions and fields of activity of cultural exchange between the PRC and the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and to relate them to the complex patterns of identity politics in the early Cold War era.⁶

In the following pages, I will discuss several crucial avenues of cultural exchange that characterized the involvement of the PRC in the cultural diplomacy of the socialist camp. These include mutual visits of orchestras, writers, and drama troupes, the participation of Chinese delegations in international competitions and festivals, and the exchange of students in fields such as arts, drama, and music. Finally, an especially important field was the translation of literature across the socialist camp. In a coordinated effort, representative examples of the national literatures—in particular new works written in the socialist spirit—were translated simultaneously into multiple languages and circulated across the bloc. Readers in Poland thus read the same Russian novels at the same time as their peers in Romania, North Korea, and the PRC, and Chinese...