Argentinian travelers to China within a Third-Worldist map. Testimonies of a fraternity (1953-1969)

NI MÓNICA

Congreso; LASA/Asia 2022: Rethinking Transpacific Ties: Asia and Latin America; 2022

Within a process that started at the beginning of the 20th century, the fifties and sixties saw the emergence of a sensibility that brought Asia, Africa and Latin America together in common identities, itineraries and imaginaries. This was condensed in the term ?Third World?, that came to name inequalities and the will of economic and political redemption. In view of an imminent world order crisis, the ideas and images of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong turned into tools to imagine a different future.This paper investigates how the networks, ideas and imaginaries of the above-mentioned Third-Worldist project was correlative to a sympathy in Latin American intellectuals in general and Argentinean in particular towards Chinese revolution. Focused on travel accounts written by Argentine intellectuals that visited the People?s Republic during the decades of 1950 and 1960 -such as Bernardo Kordon, Carlos Astrada, María Rosa Oliver and Norberto Frontini-, it is shown that the identifications and solidarities that linked them were not only expressed by high diplomats and Party activist?s itineraries and speeches, but the non-state and non-party actors were relevant as well in tracing those connections. On the other side, it is argued that the Third-Worldism -a central part of the global Maoism experience- allowed the emergence of sympathies that exceeded party positions, that was present before Maoism emerged as a distinctive political current and that was part of a broader antiimperialist solidarity.Lastly, it reflects on how the people?s diplomacy held by China, their cultural associations, the staging of a utopian land during the visits of foreign visitors, along with a shared Third-Worldist discourse, were frames that problematized in different ways the modes of relating and to think what was recognizable as the Orient.