Red China in Central Europe: Creating and deploying representations of an ally in Poland and the GDR

Abstract

As the Eastern bloc coalesced in the later 1940s, its leaders sought to present themselves to their citizens as both building a socialist utopia and offering a model for the rest of the world. Mao’s 1949 victory in China, the world’s most populous country, seemed to prefigure this inexorable deepening and broadening of communism, and Central European communists sought to deploy a representation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in service of constructing a socialist society at home. Party officials, artists and intellectuals, and ordinary citizens helped to fashion this image of China, which circulated widely throughout the public sphere in the mass media of newspapers, popular magazines, fiction and non-fiction books, music, television, and film, as well as through the wide distribution of informational pamphlets and booklets. Public demonstrations and parades featured speeches and slogans thematizing China, as did more intense campaigns like the “Month of Chinese-German Friendship.” Posters and other public visual material, especially showpiece cultural exhibitions, also helped to construct and propagate an image of the PRC. A particularly compelling source is that of visiting delegations of artists, scientists, experts, and ordinary citizens, going in both directions, as these guests gathered and left impressions open to interpretation, both official and otherwise. This dynamic began to change with the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, but even as a problematic ally and then enemy, the image of China helped to build socialism in Central Europe.