Chinese Reportage on Developing Countries in the 1950s and 1960s
Abstract
There has been considerable attention in recent years to Chinese foreign economic relations as a result of the Belt-Road Initiative. China engages with emerging economies as a leader in rapid economic development and as an investor, employer, and a resource consumer. This intersects with current discussions of Chinese conceptions of world order, including prominent debates about the ancient notion of tianxia (“all under heaven”) and its relevance to China’s contemporary aspirational world view. Essays written by Chinese authors in the 1950s and early 1960s who traveled to Third World countries at the time articulate visions of China’s place in the world in concrete images and vivid emotions. This is examined within the broader context of Chinese travel writing and how, especially in the early modern and modern periods, travel writing has been used as a lens for Chinese self-imagining in the world context.
There has been considerable attention in recent years to Sino-African relations as a result of the Belt-Road Initiative (BRI), but the premises and operation of these relations have changed a great deal since the mid-twentieth century: Now China engages with emerging African economies as a leader in rapid economic development and as an investor, employer, and a resource consumer.1This is often framed, by China officially and also by those examining and interpreting it from the outside, as a new international posture and role for China that has been made possible by its run of unprecedented economic success since the turn of the century and its increased economic and political engagement with the rest of the world, especially since its entry into the World Trade Organization. This intersects with current discussions of Chinese conceptions of world order, including prominent debates about the ancient notion of tianxia 天下 (“all under heaven”) and its relevance to China’s contemporary aspirational world view.2
Essays written by Chinese authors recruited to travel to Third World countries, often as part of delegations sent to participate in conventions on unity in the developing world, such as the Afro-Asian Conference held in April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, can fill in the background of international socialist unity of the late 1950s and early 1960s for this new economic internationalism. This should be examined within the broader context of Chinese travel writing and how, especially in the early modern and modern periods, travel writing has been used as a lens for Chinese self-imagining in the world context.
As scores of prominent Chinese officials obtained opportunities to travel to Western countries in the nine-teenth century, a modern Chinese travelogue developed under the influence of the ancient traditions of travel essay and landscape poetry. The cultural curiosity that motivated these peregrinations continued to inform twentieth-century efforts (expressing particular interest in the Soviet Union in the 1930s), though these later interests were less literary than journalistic. At the same time, serious modern Chinese writers, influenced in the wake of the May Fourth movement by Western literature, saw new potential for the exploration of personal and collective identity in the verbal reconstruction of movements through the time and space of modern East Asia.
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EDITORIAL NOTE:
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Notes:
1 See, for example, Philip Snow, “China and Africa: Camouflage,” in Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice, ed. Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 283–321.
2 Ban Wang’s edited volume China’s Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, weaves the BRI and tianxia together, while also placing emphasis on the earlier phase of socialist internationalism. Ban Wang, “Introduction,” Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, ed. Ban Wang (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–22. I am indebted to Ping Zhu for drawing my attention to this work.
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