The Case of Youth Exchanges and Interactions between the PRC and Italy in the 1950s

Soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), youth exchanges came to be a major part of the Chinese campaign to reach out and influence the people of other nations. Despite the growing scholarly discussion regarding the role of people-to-people diplomacy and external propaganda in China’s foreign policy, so far no direct attention has been paid to the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to institutionalize youth exchanges and use them as a tool to promote the new Chinese government’s foreign relations. This article locates the position of young people within the PRC’s people-to-people diplomacy. It attempts to explore youth exchanges with the West in the early years of the Cold War by focusing on relations between Italian and Chinese youth groups in the 1950s. Relying mainly on unexplored archival material and memoirs, this article documents contacts and exchanges between adult-led youth organizations and their members, and shows how Italian left-wing party-affiliated youth groups and Soviet-dominated transnational organizations provided important channels for Sino-Italian encounters and for building long-lasting contacts among potential future leaders of these countries.