Industrial and Chinese: Exhibiting Mao’s China at the Leipzig Trade Fairs

Abstract

Between 1951 and 1965, the People’s Republic of China regularly exhibited at the international trade fairs in the East German city of Leipzig. One of the major attractions of the fairs, China’s grand pavilion was second in size only to the pavilion of the Soviet Union. This article examines the planning and execution of China’s exhibitions, illustrating how the young communist regime displayed its products and political system abroad and how citizens of other socialist and capitalist countries experienced China through objects, materials, images and narratives. Because the People's Republic of China was a new revolutionary state of enormous political and economic significance and yet also a state that other socialist regimes deemed too poorly developed to transition to socialism, these exhibitions were the site of constant negotiations and tension between Chinese and East German organizers and other local decision-makers and participants. As such, the People's Republic of China’s engagement with the fairs sheds further light on its international activities after 1949 and on the local history of the Sino-Soviet split. It is also a case study that calls attention to the historical significance of materiality that underpinned China’s interactions with the wider world, from minute quotidian things to grand gifts and major export goods.

Selling ‘New’ China: Marketing and the Unmaking of a Semi-colonial State

“…5 Recent work by Jennifer Altehenger has broken new ground on this subject by drawing from German archives to examine the planning and execution of China's exhibitions at the Leipzig Fair in East Germany between 1951 and 1965. 6 In doing so, she has shown how PRC officials displayed China's products and politics abroad, how participants experienced China's exhibits at the Leipzig Fair, and the local negotiations and tensions that shaped China's participation at the fair, with particular attention to Sino-German relations. Austin Jersild has explored the PRC's role as host to socialist exhibits inside China during the 1950s, an approach that shows how officials from socialist states represented themselves and interacted with each other and the public inside the socialist bloc during the first years of the People's Republic.…”