Ziqiao Wang
Research Mentor: Ali Bolcakan
Mentor Department: Comparative Literature, LSA
Author(s): Ziqiao Wang
Session: Session 5 (2:00 PM – 2:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Abstract
In the 1960s, the Cold War was not simply a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Sino-Soviet split divided the international communist camp, forcing left-wing intellectuals around the world to choose a side. Isolated from the West and increasingly estranged from the Eastern Bloc, the Chinese Communist Party turned to “people-to-people diplomacy,†inviting foreign visitors to China to build cultural ties with Latin America and other regions of the Third World, win support for its revolutionary model, and establish itself as the authentic voice of the world’s oppressed peoples. Yet existing scholarship on this history focuses mainly on state-level diplomacy and official ideology, overlooking how individual travelers observed and narrated China — and how Chinese hosts actively shaped what visitors were allowed to see and report. This project takes two Uruguayan travelers as its central case: journalist Eduardo Galeano and economist Guillermo Bernhard, who visited China together in 1963 but returned home with starkly divergent accounts. Reading their travelogues alongside records from their accompanying Chinese officials, the project asks how their different imaginaries of China were produced throughout the journey. To explore this question, this project not only conducts traditional historical analysis, including close reading of primary sources in Chinese and Spanish, but also applies digital humanities methods to build a spatio-temporal visualization, juxtaposing multiple layers of timelines: the two travelers’ shared itinerary, their individual annals, and the broader historical context of China and Latin America in the mid 20th century. This approach treats the timeline not just as a background tool, but as an analytical one: a way of asking how texts are produced, not only what they say. By adding an individual layer to the Cold War history, this project contributes to Sino-Latin American studies and the broader field of cultural exchanges. It also explores how digital visualization can serve as a genuine method of historical analysis, uncovering patterns and divergences that close reading alone might miss.
