Introduction
In the early 1950s and 1960s, there was fierce ideological combat between the Socialist and the Capitalist Bloc. Referring itself as the leader of the “free world,” the United States of America (USA) built its worldwide propaganda network and exported cultural products aimed at glorifying capitalism and bourgeois cosmopolitanism. Meanwhile, socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) also exported cultural products to fight back. How did cultural goods from the PRC go global, and how did the PRC government conduct cultural Cold War across different geopolitical spaces in East and Southeast Asia?
In the China field, the study of the Mao era (1949-1976) has long been confined within the national framework of the PRC. In recent years, scholars have begun to position PRC history in the global context of the Cold War and have noticed the transnational flow of cultural products within the Socialist Bloc (Volland 2017), or between socia...