4 - Asia’s Fourth Rome

Summary

Making the People’s Republic of China appear great after 1949 was a technically and organizationally complex problem that required the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mobilize all of the cultural resources at its disposal. Messianism about China’s greatness was an important aspect of Mao’s charisma as a leader, and this message was in turn disseminated internationally through repeated reference to the uniqueness and success of China’s revolutionary “path,” particularly within decolonizing Asia. When confronted with the dilemma of how to engage with nonsocialist countries, or those for which revolution was a more distant concern, the CCP’s response was instead to engage in more generic forms of cultural diplomacy which highlighted China’s achievements as a great and developing nation. International cultural display was therefore a relatively low-cost approach to signaling greatness and earning respect even in settings where relations were not carried out on a basis of socialist “fraternity.”

This chapter examines the resulting sequence of steps taken by the CCP to globally communicate China’s greatness and legitimacy. Its main focus is the film industry, which played a significant role in the dissemination of information about China’s post-1949 reconstruction during the politically turbulent Korean War period. By the mid-1950s, the PRC’s nascent international cultural infrastructure stretched from Geneva to Jakarta, underpinned by cultural industries and politically directed exchange networks at home. Mao’s promise to make the world see China as civilized first required that the world be made to see – as influence expanded, recognition of China’s greatness would surely follow