Mao-era China and Cold War cultural diplomacy: an overview of recent scholarship

This paper does not make claims to be revisionist in arguing that the politics and culture of Mao-era China had international reach: any historian of (for example) 1960s France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, India, Southeast Asia, Peru and so on will be well aware of engagement with Maoist political theory and practice outside China.Footnote ¹¹ Yet until relatively recently, few scholars considered the international spread of ideas about Maoist China between the 1950s and 1970s in a bilateral or transnational way: the extent to which the enthusiasm for Maoism was driven by what non-Chinese imagined Maoism to be; the extent to which impressions of China were actively shaped by Maoist China. Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims undertook an acute, comparative analysis of Western ‘fellow-travellers’ to Communist regimes including the USSR, the PRC, Vietnam and Cuba, but without accessing Chinese-language sources.Footnote ¹² For decades, moreover, study of Cold War politics, diplomacy and culture in the West remained largely Eurocentric in focus, preoccupied with the USSR–US axis. Although many international histories of communism and the Cold War have been written in European languages, for years they tended to treat Maoism as little more than a case-study within a Eurocentric whole.Footnote ¹³ As a result, the importance of Maoist China in this conflict as offering a genuine alternative to USSR communism, providing intellectual and practical support to rebels throughout the world, was until recently relatively neglected in mainstream scholarship on the Cold War.Footnote ¹⁴

Scholarship on the Cold War of the past fifteen years has, however, steadily acknowledged more fully the Asian and specifically Chinese influence. Odd Arne Westad has crucially expanded previously Western-centric perspectives on the Cold War, bringing the study of the role played by the Third World into mainstream scholarship on the conflict.Footnote ¹⁵ As part of this greater globalisation of Cold War history, manifested also in the journal Cold War History and in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, we have in recent years seen a welcome increase in the participation of mainland Chinese scholars in international and Anglophone debates about Maoism and the Cold War, in for example Chen Jian's Mao's China and the Cold War and Qiang Zhai's China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975.Footnote ¹⁶

Since 2000, China historians and political scientists such as Zheng Yangwen, Anne-Marie Brady, Alexander Cook, Cagdas Ungor and Matthew Johnson have pioneered a more transnational approach to China's approach to cultural diplomacy in the Cold War. The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (edited by Zheng Yangwen, Liu Hong and Michael Szonyi) argued for the importance of the Asian theatre in general, and of the impact of Mao-era China in particular, to Cold War culture and diplomacy.Footnote ¹⁷The Cold War in Asia was therefore particularly timely in offering wide-ranging and practical insights into the cultural and political channels along which Maoism played an international role, in countries including Burma, Indonesia, Mexico and Sweden. Alexander Cook's 2014 volume of essays, The Little Red Book: A Global History, furthermore provided an illuminating selection of national case-studies describing the international reception of Mao's Little Red Book.

With her two monographs The Friend of China: The Myth of Rewi Alley and Making the Foreign Serve China, Anne-Marie Brady trail-blazed study of Chinese-language sources on the PRC's foreign affairs system.Footnote ¹⁸ Particularly in the latter volume, Brady provided a thorough history of this system and its Soviet antecedents, while making innovative use of internal foreign affairs publications and manuals, and analysing the cases of specific individuals (such as Edgar Snow) courted by Beijing as useful ‘international friends’. Matthew Johnson's recent research into the visits of black American writers to the PRC through the 1950s and 1960s (making use of both Chinese- and English-language sources) has illuminated Mao-era China's attempts to assert a leading role in the global revolutionary, anti-imperialist movement.Footnote ¹⁹ Cagdas Ungor's doctoral dissertation on the PRC's ‘external propaganda’ (duiwai xuanchuan) machinery has cast important light on the network of foreign-language broadcast and print media, such as Peking Radio and periodicals including Peking Review and China Reconstructs, through which Mao-era China attempted to win global influence.Footnote ²⁰

In sum, recent work on Mao-era China's foreign relations has used Chinese-language archival materials made newly accessible over the past two decades to suggest that during the 1950s and 1960s China poured large amounts of money and expertise into a painstaking and at times sophisticated soft-power programme. Not all this money and effort was wisely spent: Ungor's analysis of Maoist China's often clumsily designed external propaganda substantially undermined earlier, Cold War-era portrayals of China's foreign-language publications as highly effective ideological weapons. Nonetheless, both older and more recent research indicates that some of the PRC's efforts at cultural diplomacy garnered rich political dividends, in both hard- and soft-power terms. Greater understanding of Maoist China's cultural diplomacy could have an impact on our view of the exercise of both hard and soft power on both sides of the Cold War divide. If the international enthusiasm for Maoist China was substantially engineered by the Chinese government itself, what does this phenomenon tell us about the priorities of the Chinese state and leadership at the time? How important was China as a cultural and political actor in the Cold War?

Several aspects of Mao-era China's international soft and hard-power programmes would reward further investigation: the efficacy of public overtures such as external propaganda; the workings of shadowier organisations, especially the International Department (Zhonglianbu), which directed crucial relationships between the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and other national communist parties.Footnote ²¹ But for reasons of space, this paper will consider just one of the channels along which the People's Republic between 1949 and 1976 tried to project international, soft-power messages: the inviting of so-called ‘foreign guests’ (waibin) on carefully planned tours around China, often with all or at least some expenses paid and with the bonus of one-on-one conversations with leaders such as Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai, the country's charming, urbane foreign minister then premier between the 1950s and 1970s.

The government of Mao-era China hoped that, back in their own countries, these travellers would return the favour of hospitality through speeches, articles, books and political briefings that would spread positive propaganda for the People's Republic. Until 1954, the People's Republic was officially recognised by only twenty-one other states. In this situation, courting non-diplomatic delegations was an essential part of China's campaign to improve its international image, at a time when its official avenues for exercising influence were narrow. How, then, was this hospitality planned and carried out? And what results did it produce?

Contemporary accounts evoke a veritable foreign delegation industry in Mao-era China. Travelling troupes – of both the famous and the obscure – flooded Beijing: rumour had it that fourteen hotels in the capital alone were dedicated to the delegation trade through the 1950s. This is what one witness wrote about such establishments in 1958:

To give a sense of the scale of the enterprise: perhaps as many as 100,000 such delegates visited in the first decade of the People's Republic alone.Footnote ²³

Reports written from both sides of the encounter evoke a machine of perfect control, judged to play to the individual weaknesses of particular visitors, and rehearsed to ensure flawless performances by Chinese hosts. In his 1962 memoir Escape from Red China (written after fleeing China in 1957 via Hong Kong) Robert Loh, a Shanghai factory manager, gave a view from inside the system. His role was to play the part of a gently reformed capitalist to foreign visitors to Shanghai in the 1950s. He was to reassure foreigners that the Communists’ humanity and moderation had won over even bourgeois industrialists to Chinese socialism. He wrote: ‘The process of deceiving the foreigners resembles theatrical production. Each little play is carefully staged and rehearsed.’Footnote ²⁴ By 1954,

These could include, Loh recounted, elegantly bourgeois ornaments, books and records, and luxuries such as imported food, cigarettes and alcohol.Footnote ²⁵

Loh underlined the political sensitivity of the work: ‘even a small slip. . .could have international repercussions. . .Thus, whenever I was chosen to entertain a group of foreigners, I would be informed at least a week in advance. I would then attend meetings in which I would receive “guidance”.’ Every aspect of every ‘performance’ was minuted by ‘interpreters’ (in reality, politically reliable cadres) who subsequently produced full reports of everything seen and discussed.Footnote ²⁶

The Communists, Loh concluded, ‘rarely blundered once they had perfected their means of deceiving foreigners.

In a depressingly effective appeal to vanity, hosts often reassured visiting authors of the canonical status of their books in China: for how could such a writer then accuse such a country of intellectual repression?Footnote ²⁸

The scenarios were sometimes planned far in advance, especially if children were involved. Loh remembered how the authorities ordered that, weeks before the household received some African visitors, the daughter of one of his closest friends, also an industrialist, be given a doll painted black to accustom her to the idea of dark skin. When two African ladies eventually visited the family, the little girl had been trained to rush up to them both and give them a kiss. Loh wrote: ‘It was remarkably successful. The two ladies were so touched that they had tears in their eyes.’Footnote ²⁹

Loh's account is backed up by selected Western eye-witnesses, who affirmed that ‘nothing was left to chance’ in orchestrating foreign visits to Maoist China. Jacques Marcuse, a Belgian journalist in Beijing through the 1950s, observed that ‘the special correspondent is given the VIPP (Very Important Potential Propagandist) treatment. . .you do not allow visitors to see anything but that which you want them to see’.Footnote ³⁰ The political scientist Paul Hollander, in his analysis of Western ‘political pilgrims’ to Communist countries, has described the ‘techniques of hospitality’ rolled out by Maoist China to make the very best impression on visitors: flowers, cars, banquets, elite healthcare, luxurious hotels. On her 1954 visit to the PRC, Simone de Beauvoir was apparently particularly taken by her Beijing hotel room's two brass double beds and pink silk sheets.Footnote ³¹ Loh, Marcuse and Hollander, therefore, all coincide in painting a picture of a remarkably effective state hospitality machine, dedicated to manicuring international views of China.

At this point, it would be reasonable to interject that there was little special about the great care with which the PRC received foreign guests. All governments research and brief on visitors, and strive to put their best foot forward. Consider the elaborate preparations for Irish president Michael Higgins's 2014 state visit to the UK, or the vast security apparatus built around the presidential travels of George W. Bush after 9/11. But I would like to argue that officially micromanaged foreign visits to Maoist China are a little different, because they represented one of a very few channels by which one could gain access to China during these years. Contemporary Irish visitors to the UK, by contrast, can draw their impressions from a much wider range of sources and contacts. To the Maoist government, these visitors offered a crucial opportunity to construct and control the country's international image. An early scholar of the PRC's cultural diplomacy, Herbert Passim, wrote:

Non-political, non-diplomatic visitors were often indulged by Maoist China as state guests, not tourists: many were met at the airport by ministers, they enjoyed audiences with Mao and Zhou and their visits were publicised on the front pages of newspapers.Footnote ³³ And because contemporary visitors to, and information on, the People's Republic were scarce outside China, the eye-witness reports of such travellers enjoyed a greater prestige and influence back in their home countries. One sometimes encountered the strange spectacle of a non-specialist visitor to China regarding themselves or being regarded, on his or her return, as an expert on the country, merely by virtue of having been there.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, through the 1950s the Chinese government often showed an inclination to refuse visas to people with a background in Chinese studies or Chinese language skills, indicating a preference for visitors without prior or independent knowledge of China.Footnote ³⁵

And now that provincial and Foreign Ministry archives in China are partially open, we can read some of the plethora of reports written before and after many foreign visits, cataloguing plans, successes and deficiencies. We can see a little into the internal workings of the system: its scope and capacity. Was it as seamlessly choreographed as our witnesses cited above describe? What were its stand-out public relations coups? And when did it fail?

There can be no doubt that, in the minds of leaders like Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi and Mao Zedong, hosting foreign visitors represented high-level, confidential political work. In 1950, while Communist armies were still quashing the last remnants of opposition in the south and while the country was hammered by hyper-inflation, the Foreign Ministry focused on taking control of all contact between Chinese institutions and foreign visitors: ‘From now on, any institution that receives foreign guests must first contact the Foreign Ministry. This is mandatory.’Footnote ³⁶ A report from 1954 declared that ‘receiving foreign guests is. . .an extremely significant political job, crucial for warming up the international situation. . .If rightists don't come, they’ll always be saying bad things about us. If we do let them come, they’ll find that difficult.’Footnote ³⁷ Documents from 1958 and 1964 reiterated: ‘To receive foreign guests well, politics must take command’Footnote ³⁸ and such work must be supervised only by ‘politically reliable cadres with a high level of policy and professional competence’.Footnote ³⁹ ‘Any mistake will result directly in political losses’, emphasised a 1953 circular.Footnote ⁴⁰

Documents outlining even mundane arrangements – numbers of guests, details of invitations, banqueting plans – were annotated by Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi, indicating the leadership's micromanagement of such issues. All the way up to his death, Zhou personally received thousands of foreign visitors: not just high-level dignitaries, but also journalists, students, teachers, trade delegations, sports teams. At one point, Zhang Wentian – deputy foreign minister through the 1950s – ridiculed Zhou's focus on such work, objecting that Zhou ought to spend his time on more important, strategic matters and that he was spending too much of the Ministry's budget on drinking Maotai – a kind of Chinese liquor commonly used for banqueting toasts – with foreign journalists. Zhou disagreed: he responded that he was willing to pay for the food and drink himself, but that he was determined to continue. In diplomacy, he once remarked, ‘there's no such thing as a small detail’ (waijiao wu xiaoshi).

Logistical preparations for visits were strenuous. In the words of one report, ‘every link must be pulled tight’: from the drawing up of propaganda, to the preparation of accommodation and food.Footnote ⁴¹ There was a strong psychological logic underpinning the material care with which visits were managed. Paul Hollander places adroit emphasis on the importance of ‘hospitality’ as a technique for making individuals feel guiltily indebted to their Chinese hosts and inclined to reciprocate positively. In the archives, short-term foreigners in China are never described as ‘visitors’ or ‘travellers’: they are always ‘foreign guests’ (waibin), with all the implications of indebtedness that the word brings. Given the numbers of foreign visitors travelling to China even during the Mao era, not all had their costs covered by Chinese state organisations. Yet evidence in archival reports and eye-witness accounts suggests a strong cosseting principle at work: visitors were to be showered with attention and goodies, leaving them as gratefully dependent on their hosts as possible. Even at the toughest of times, the appropriateness of such expenditure was not questioned. Queen Elisabeth of Belgium visited in 1961, near the apogee of the post-Great Leap Forward famine, a predominantly manmade disaster generated by radical collectivisation after 1957. Nonetheless, all Queen Elisabeth's costs (including hairdressing and laundry) were covered by China, and thousands of yuan spent on presents. The cadres in charge reasoned: ‘We must dispel their suspicions about our country, for example that we are having a famine and that the communes have collapsed and that Chinese people are warmongers.’Footnote ⁴²

Dossiers were compiled on the political background of every guest: to understand and exploit their vulnerabilities. Again in preparation for Queen Elisabeth's arrival, the Beijing government undertook research into the interpersonal complexities of the Belgian royal retinue of a thoroughness worthy of Paris Match. These files were then diligently studied by all cadres who had contact with particular foreigners: ‘to imagine in advance all the kinds of questions that foreign guests might ask’.Footnote ⁴³ One directive acknowledged that ‘This kind of work is very stressful, it's easy to get tired and irritated. . .the questions asked by foreign guests are sometimes limited but sometimes limitless. Sometimes you need an encyclopedia to satisfy them.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Words of welcome, introductory remarks and question-and-answer sessions were to be scripted in advance and censored first by the work unit's senior leadership, and then by at least two cadres in the Propaganda Department of the Committee for Receiving Foreign Guests. Once approved, all this material was turned into secret, internal pamphlets, again to be studied by hosting cadres.

There was a handy eight-syllable slogan to express the appropriate political approach: ‘seem relaxed on the outside, but be tense inside, and don't give anything away’ (waisong neijin, bulu henji).Footnote ⁴⁵ The levels of vigilance demanded verged on the obsessive compulsive. As one report hectored: ‘Planning, arrangement and checking: all three are essential. There can be no exceptionalism. Once you have checked everything, check it again.’Footnote ⁴⁶

Reports written before and after visits evoke a system of military discipline, a discipline that applied equally regardless of the political affiliations of the visitors. In some cases, the ratio of minders to delegates was almost one-to-one. A miscellaneous group of 214 visitors to Shanghai in 1953 (from Western Europe, the United States and non-socialist Asia) was accompanied by 212 cadres dispatched by the Central Committee.Footnote ⁴⁷ When Kim Il-sung visited Shanghai in 1958, the welcoming party was 6,900 strong, and every member had to be ‘politically pure’. In advance of Kim's arrival, almost eighty ‘suspicious elements’ were arrested or put under intensified surveillance; twenty-three were sent off for labour reform. The ranks of those selected to be shown to the Koreans were also checked and cleansed: for example, the children of landlords and rightists were purged, again ‘to guarantee political purity’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Security was deemed essential: on a 1953 visit, the special operatives detailed to a foreign delegation disguised themselves variously as messengers, odd-jobbers, room attendants, receptionists and guides; they wiped baths, they piled bedding, they brought refreshments, but their true function, apparently, was never identified by the foreign guests.Footnote ⁴⁹ Secrecy and organisation became all the more pressing at moments of political and social crisis. Despite the fact that much of China was starving in 1960, the government went ahead with its plans to invite more than 2,000 foreign guests to attend National Day celebrations. But planning was beset by fundamental logistical problems. A Foreign Ministry directive warned: ‘The task of providing their food will be very onerous. Recently, because of the tensions surrounding food supply, we have discovered that bad elements have broken into food supplies for foreign guests in food trucks. . .Reduce as far as possible the number of cities that the foreign guests visit.’Footnote ⁵⁰

Still the show went on: a banquet, a reception on the Tiananmen rostrum and a fireworks display hosted by Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi, to which all foreign guests, experts and journalists in Beijing were invited.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, through the famine years of 1959 to 1961, both foreign visitors and residents complained – with unwitting grotesquerie – of how hard it was to keep the pounds off in China. Rewi Alley, a long-term New Zealand resident in China, wrote to his nephew in 1961: ‘How does one get weight down? I am 200 and should be 170. Only one way I suppose. That strong push away from the table!!’Footnote ⁵²

Internal Chinese reports claimed that all this work won major PR triumphs for the CCP. Chinese write-ups of visits are scattered with approbatory comments: Sri Lankan agronomists, Polish economists, Indian and Greek Communists who exclaimed that China was now their model. One Argentian hugged his host cadre with delight after a visit to a commune.Footnote ⁵³

One of the remarkable aspects of this system is how willingly – according to both Chinese and non-Chinese accounts – many foreign visitors drew conclusions about the general superiority of the system from a carefully choreographed visit to a single model commune, school, farmer or temple. Even the handlers for a 1952 delegation that included Nehru's sister, Mrs Pandit, seemed surprised by how easily convinced the visitors were after seeing just one temple in Shanghai that Chinese people enjoyed freedom of religious belief.Footnote ⁵⁴

Yet the real proof of the system lay not in what guests politely said to their expectant minders, but in how they responded when they were far beyond China. A good example can be seen in the response of Edgar Snow, the American journalist upon whom the CCP first developed many of their foreigner-handling techniques.

In 1936, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi, in consultation with one of the Communists’ most useful and influential Chinese fellow-travellers Song Qingling, had carefully picked Snow as the ideal mouthpiece for taking their story to the international world. Song Qingling occupied an unusual and highly prestigious role in Chinese politics of the 1920s to 1940s. As the widow of the veteran revolutionary and first president of the republic, Sun Yat-sen (who died in 1925), she had impeccable revolutionary credentials. In 1927, the Chinese revolution split between left and right, when Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist Party, ended the Soviet-sponsored united front with the Communists with a bloody purge. Song Qingling sided with the left, briefly seeking refuge in Moscow and Europe before settling back in Shanghai in 1931 as a determined critic of Chiang's Nationalist regime. She was protected from intense Nationalist persecution of Communists and the leftwing between 1927 and 1936 by her family connections: not only by being Sun Yat-sen's widow but also, perhaps just as importantly, the beloved older sister of Chiang Kai-shek's wife, Song Meiling. After returning to China, Song Qingling helped the Communist underground operation (for example, by liaising with the CCP, Soviet Union and Comintern in Shanghai, hosting meetings for those with CCP connections, finding sympathetic foreigners to mediate contact between Shanghai and the CCP Central Committee deep in rural China and even personally funding Mao's revolutionary base in the north-west of China).Footnote ⁵⁵

Snow was one of several sympathetic, useful foreigners whom Song Qingling guided towards the CCP in the 1930s. He was a well-disposed but non-communist American with excellent media connections. Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai invited him, through an underground network, to spend weeks visiting their beleaguered state in north-west China, which was under military threat from the Nationalists.Footnote ⁵⁶ According to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (who, in their biography of Mao, write scathingly of Snow's gullibility in the face of a CCP charm offensive), before Snow's arrival at Communist headquarters, Mao gave four instructions for the visit: ‘Security, secrecy, warmth and red carpet.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Mao and his confreres had chosen and primed their man well. The following year, Snow wrote up his impressions and interviews of the Communist base area in the north-west (heavily censored by Mao and Zhou) into the global bestseller Red Star over China. The book turned Mao into an international political personality, portraying him as a disarmingly laidback, affable patriot.Footnote ⁵⁸

Red Star was an important public relations success when the CCP was on the point of annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government. Snow's 1961 book, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today, spoke out for Communist China at another crisis point: at the height of the post-Great Leap Forward famine, in which tens of millions died of starvation or the effects of malnutrition largely caused by state economic mismanagement.Footnote ⁵⁹ Though not entirely without its criticisms of China, the book found in favour of the Communist regime under Mao. In his introduction, Snow insisted that he had been given perfect access during a six-month visit in 1960 (his first return to the country since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949): ‘I cannot complain about lack of opportunity to see China. I was to travel, if anything, too extensively in the time I had available. . .I think I know more about all these people than I could possibly have understood had I never returned to China.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Throughout, Snow described how, in his tour of the country, he caught up with old friends, both foreign and Chinese (and including Mao and Zhou), and was cheerily received by countless citizens of New China. There was nothing to imply reserve, control or manipulation in his write-ups of these genial, comradely encounters. Most crucially perhaps, from a PRC propaganda perspective, the book denied famine and starvation several times:

Files on preparations for Snow's visit in Beijing archives tell a different story. A top-secret planning document from 1960 dissected Snow's character and situation with clinical chilliness, with a view to exploiting his weaknesses for the PRC's benefit.

Snow's writing, the report observes, ‘has [in the past] served a beneficial propaganda purpose for us. But he himself is not a progressive individual. . .we guess that he has some link with the State Department. . .In recent years he has suffered repeated professional frustrations and setbacks. . .big newspapers refuse his articles.’ (By 1960, McCarthyism had driven Snow and his family into Swiss exile.) The report goes on:

To his diary, Snow confided his suspicions that all was not as it seemed:

Indeed, Foreign Ministry archives on Snow's visit contain informants’ reports on private conversations provided by old, non-Chinese ‘friends’ (and loyal servants of the Communist government) whom Snow described so warmly in his book: Israel Epstein and George Hatem.Footnote ⁶⁴

Yet in writing up The Other Side of the River, Snow kept his misgivings to himself. Once more, Mao and Zhou had chosen their man well: Snow had financial reasons for siding with China. He owed too much of his journalistic reputation to his writing on China through the 1930s and 1940s; he had a wife and two young children to support. He needed access to write a successful book on China; and he needed to write favourably enough about China to maintain future access.

Bill Jenner, now a retired professor of Chinese history, has spoken of the book's impact on him as a young doctoral student in 1962, just before he decided to travel to Maoist China himself to work for two years as a translator in Beijing's Foreign Languages Press, the government organisation that published China's so-called ‘external propaganda’ for foreign readers. He bought a copy of the book using prize money he had won at graduation.

Communist hospitality also scored successes with hard-power implications: in 1962, the Communist leadership selected Jan Myrdal, a struggling Swedish leftwing novelist, to be invited on an all-expenses paid trip to China, including a month in a model village in the north-west. The paean to the Chinese rural revolution that resulted, Myrdal's 1963 book Report from a Chinese Village, became an international bestseller (thereby securing Myrdal's livelihood) and a rallying text for the radical leftwing and student rebels in 1960s Sweden.Footnote ⁶⁶ As the founding member of a Swedish Maoist grouping formed in the 1960s, Myrdal subsequently led protests against the Vietnam War; this spike in radicalism worried Sweden's ruling political party enough for it to take a neutral stance on American intervention in Indochina, thereby weakening international support for US policy.Footnote ⁶⁷

Thanks in part to Zhou Enlai's careful hosting of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia through the 1950s and 1960s, the prince took refuge in China after he was ousted by a military coup in 1970. There, across the ensuing five years, the Chinese brokered an alliance between Sihanouk and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, one that dramatically boosted the Cambodian Communists’ international and national respectability, and furthered Maoist China's aim of spreading communism through Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁶⁸

Skilful Chinese hospitality may also have helped export the Maoist revolution to Indonesia, with appalling consequences. The chairman of the Indonesian Communist Party, Aidit, a great admirer of Mao and his revolution, visited the same model commune twice, in 1959 and 1961, and was given the full propaganda treatment. Having emphasised that entry to the commune was entirely voluntary, his hosts in 1961 explained all the great transformations that had taken place in the preceding two years, and flatteringly presented him with a book that had reprinted an inscription that he had left in 1959. Aidit's Chinese minders in 1959 and 1961 deftly concealed the true nature of the Commune system – terror, starvation, cannibalism – and reinforced Aidit's respect for the Maoist experiment. The report on his visit commented that ‘Aidit was very satisfied. He said: ‘You can see that the changes here [over the past two years] are huge. . .I am delighted. . .I wish you ever greater success in the future.’ Four years later, in 1965, directly encouraged and (some historians argue) funded by Mao and his lieutenants, Aidit helped launch a coup against the Indonesian army, expecting triumph for his Communist Party. Instead, the armed forces under General Suharto reasserted control and launched a purge that killed some 500,000 suspected communists, many of them ethnic Chinese.Footnote ⁶⁹

Despite the fastidiousness of preparations, the archives also expose weaknesses in China's international hospitality machine. In 1953, at least, it seems clear that the smooth operation described by Robert Loh was not yet in place: foreign guests complained about getting earache from the constant comparisons of China's glorious present with its dreadful past; that a trip to China was a ‘journalist's punishment’; that minders accompanied guests through meals to spy on them; that the Chinese were trying to buy their guests through farewell gifts of clothes and cash.Footnote ⁷⁰ In a serious gaffe, one foreign affairs cadre revealed to one of the guests that every delegate had been extensively researched in advance.Footnote ⁷¹ A 1950 Foreign Ministry directive about how to receive foreign guests gives a flavour of how much the Ministry felt its employees had to learn in terms of international polish. It contained plenty of useful, factual guidance about the difference between a sit-down dinner and a buffet; about how to behave in the face of a bread roll (namely, you should break off a piece and butter it). But there was also a substantial amount of hectoring about more basic issues: reminding diplomats, when leaving the toilet, to check that their flies were done up; not to yawn openly in front of interlocutors, not to pick nose or ears.Footnote ⁷² Reports of visits by foreign guests well into the 1950s were studded with complaints that cadres were snapping at each other through stress and over-work;Footnote ⁷³ or that they were ill-prepared, or wooden; or drunk.Footnote ⁷⁴

Sometimes, foreign guests seriously imperiled international camaraderie. Consider the following, slightly cryptic report: ‘Recently, some foreign guests have engaged upon discourteous behavior towards female attendants, which has gone beyond the bounds of friendly unity with international friends. . .From now on, only male attendants will service the rooms of male guests.’Footnote ⁷⁵ The sheer numbers of foreign travellers to Maoist China would suggest, moreover, that it was not logistically possible for every visit to be perfectly monitored and choreographed.Footnote ⁷⁶

The Chinese masses could prove unruly, also, and impervious to efforts to deploy them in the service of ‘international friendship’. The archives are scattered with embarrassed reports of rude receptions: of Chinese children and adults gathering around African visitors to a Beijing hutong, pointing and laughing that ‘their skin is like tree bark. . .their heads look like pigs’;Footnote ⁷⁷ of workers ignoring friendly Albanians, or gathering around the back of one Polish visitor, pointing at his neck (the work summary explained that it was very thick and red).Footnote ⁷⁸ Despite the exhaustive, and exhausting, preparations for Kim Il-sung's visit described above, the commanding cadres still found fault with the performance of the masses. The team of welcoming students at East China Chemistry Institute, they specified, were extremely ill-disciplined: they did not shout slogans or sing songs, they messed about throwing flowers and strips of paper at each other, ‘creating a very bad influence’.Footnote ⁷⁹

The thinness of the façade could be exposed with alarming ease. A report from a model commune near Shanghai, which from 10 to 14 October 1959 alone received at least two delegations of foreign visitors a day, suggests that the hosts at one point let slip the staged, Potemkin nature of what was on display.

The experience suggests that even slightly spontaneous arrangements were fraught with risk.

Despite the research undertaken in advance by Chinese hosts, they could still misread their guests. After Mrs Pandit's minders in 1952 took her to call on Song Qingling, they observed that Mrs Pandit viewed Song as ‘half-woman, half-goddess’.Footnote ⁸¹ Outside China, Mrs Pandit seemed less worshipful: in a debriefing conversation with the American ambassador in Delhi following her trip to China, she remarked that Song was ‘closely confined’ in Shanghai. ‘She seemed bitter at world generally and had little to say.’ Mrs Pandit's report to the Americans contradicted in other places the responses recorded by her Chinese minders. According to the Chinese report, the Indian delegations gasped with admiration at the socialist construction that they saw: on being shown a swimming pool, for example, they remarked that in India, building even a tap with running water would be a major event. To the US ambassador, Mrs Pandit said: ‘Chi[nese] health conditions remain serious even worse than in India.’ Mrs Pandit's Chinese handlers were confident that they had been warmly welcoming, stressing the Chinese people's love of peace. This is what she reported back to the Americans: ‘The effort being made [to] educate people and particularly children is frightening in its thoroughness and doctrinaire qualities. From kindergarten up, every stage of education ruthlessly controlled.’Footnote ⁸²

The writer Frank Tuohy, on a visit to Nanjing in 1966, asked to see a children's drawing class, after visiting a classroom adorned only with pictures of Chairman Mao. The following day, his request was granted and he observed a primary school class copying ‘clippings of girl guerrillas shooting down planes with rifles; paper tigers being throttled by the Viet Cong; three Americans – a bishop, a professor and a doctor – standing arm-in-arm over a pile of corpses; GIs with the features of President Johnson being bayonetted up the rear. . .The guide’, he noted, ‘seemed offended by our lack of enthusiasm.’Footnote ⁸³

A long and intricate paper-trail remains to be traced out, before the true impact of China's hosting work can be fully understood: we need to explore the post-China writings and public engagements of those carefully courted, and to work out who read and who listened to them. To gain a preliminary sense of this, we could return to the example of Edgar Snow. In Chinese, German and Italian translations, his writing on Chinese communism was eagerly consumed by Chinese and Southeast Asian revolutionaries, and by European radicals between the 1940s and 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁴ The careful suppression of the extent and causes of political cataclysms such as the famine of the 1960s – to which Snow contributed – made it possible for young sinologists of the late Maoist era to write influential academic articles and books that validated Mao and his revolution both before and after Mao's death in 1976.Footnote ⁸⁵

Maoist China's hosting programme, moreover, had a domestic as well as an international focus. Foreigners were the official target, but the government also used the spectacle to underscore at home the triumph of the revolution. A 1953 report observed that

A Shanghai worker visited by a West German in 1957 drew similar, grateful conclusions: ‘Before Liberation’, she told the cadres who had trained her for the visit, ‘who would have visited a worker like me? But now that we have “turned over” [fanshen, the Chinese communist term for having undergone revolutionary transformation], we are the masters/hosts. . .and foreign guests visit us: this is an unprecedented honour for my family.’ The worker's family ‘diligently prepared for the visit, wanting to show the foreign guest how well workers lived after the revolution’.Footnote ⁸⁷

To Communist officials, preparing ordinary people to put on a show for foreign guests was part of a much bigger political project: mobilising the enthusiasm and energy of the masses for party political aims.Footnote ⁸⁸ For this, and many other reasons, there is a certain melancholy to reading the archives on China's hosting machine: a sense of Maoist China being one vast stage-set – the Chinese playing to the foreigners, the foreigners playing back to the Chinese, and back and forth it goes.