Arab encounters with Maoist China: transnational journeys, diasporic lives and intellectual discourses

Abstract

This paper examines the appeal exerted by Maoist China upon a broad category of Arab onlookers from the mid-twentieth century onwards. It accomplishes this by focussing on the writings of two categories of observers: short-term visitors, who had experienced China through government-organised planned tours, and long-term residents, foreign experts, who had been recruited by the Chinese state as language instructors, translators and editors. Across the ideological spectrum and with a high-degree of consistency, these diverse onlookers articulated highly romanticised images of Maoist China as a model for post-colonial modernity. These sympathetic imaginaries, the paper argues, stemmed less from a systematic engagement with Chinese realities on-the-ground, and more from a sense of anxiety over the Arab world. Maoist China was in essence reconceptualized as a ‘homeland that could have been,’ offering lessons as well as hope for the future as filtered through the ideological biases of these observers. The paper discusses the writings of short-term visitors and long-term residents through a broader retelling of the history of the Arab diaspora in Maoist and early post-Maoist China. It also utilises previously neglected sources, most notably the China-centric works of Salamah ‘Ubayd (1921–1984) and Hadi al-’Alawi (1932–1998), in presenting its key arguments.