To Win Friends and Influence People: The Xinhua News Agency in China's Cold War

This talk will focus on the work of Xinhua’s foreign correspondents during the Cold War, and especially their role as political mediators in the process of China’s supposed “opening” in the 1970s. Often overlooked in the history of this “opening” in the 1970s are the unique trajectories of Beijing’s relations with capitalist nations other than the United States. Focusing on the rapprochement processes with Japan and West Germany, this talk will aim to bring to the fore some striking similarities in how the establishment of diplomatic relations with these two countries was realized. A challenge for Beijing was that, due to the absence of official relations, there were limited channels for communication about a possible rapprochement, which forced the government to make use of nominally non-governmental actors to establish a network of contacts and provide them with accurate information on the countries in question. A major boost for this process was the agreement that the Xinhua News Agency could place permanent foreign correspondents in Tokyo and Bonn in 1964. In this talk we will seek to trace the activities of these Chinese journalists, and how they were tasked with building a network that had to include influential figures in Japan and West Germany that were not natural sympathizers of the PRC.

About the speaker:

Casper Wits is a University Lecturer in East Asia Studies at Leiden University. His research focuses on postwar diplomatic and international history in East Asia, with a special interest in the development of Chinese and Japanese foreign policy and Sino-Japanese relations in this period. Before coming to Leiden he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, and a Lecturer at the University of Tübingen.

"Talks in Chinese Humanities" are co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Discipline of Chinese Studies and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities at the University of Sydney and the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at UNSW.

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