Selling the Revolution: Communist China’s Capitalist Ambassadors, 1949–79

In addition to happy, productive workers and politically aware farmers, travelers to Mao’s China regularly met another great miracle of its ongoing march toward socialism: “red” capitalists, who embraced both their class status and the revolution that promised to make them obsolete. Though few in number, they became a regular junket feature, as standard as any acrobatic performance, and savvy travellers expected to meet one. These Marxist millionaires presented a strange but alluring image; while they often looked and even lived like capitalists, they served as articulate and persuasive spokesmen for the Chinese Communist Party. 

This paper focuses on these capitalists and foreigner visits with them as a window onto both the evolving place of business and how businessmen themselves were deployed in an effort to make travel meaningful in Mao’s China. Encounters with these capitalists were certainly staged, with elaborate preparation, numerous props, and extensive practice. This very care shows both the importance the regime accorded to such encounters and gives us insight into the image they hoped to project. Visitors, for their part, could be cynical or credulous, but even those inclined to suspicion had to account for these red capitalists as they decided what to make of the China they saw. How persuasive or effective was this effort? In the end, the true rewards would come in the future, as China embarked on economic reforms in the 1980s and called upon many of the same characters to reprise their roles and sell a similar vision, though perhaps with greater success.