Dr. TAO Yunzhu2025-09-022025-09-022023Tao, Y. Z. (5 Jan 2023). Flying swallows’ on and off stage: The politics of socialist Zaji diplomacy in Cold War Hong Kong and beyond (1950s-70s). 2023 Hawai‘i International Conference on Chinese Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, Hawai‘i.https://manoa.hawaii.edu/hiccs/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/HICCS-2023-long-program.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11861/24890This paper focuses on the PRC’s reformed acrobatic performances with socialist Chineseness and how they were circulated and became critical tool for Cold War cultural propaganda in Hong Kong and worldwide. Inspired by the USSR’s reform of Soviet acrobatics in the 1950s, the PRC conducted large-scale socialist reform on the staff and crew of acrobatic troupes, facilitated the well-being of acrobatic artists, as well as promoting innovation of acrobatic programs. Regarded as having less overt communist messages and conveying a benevolent image of the new PRC, the reformed socialist acrobatic performances with traditional Chinese elements were made into feature films and documentaries and were exported overseas, especially to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Compared with traditional print media, audiovisual media can arouse emotional resonance among Chinese national and global spectators apart from simply reporting factual details of the event. In Acrobatic Knights, a documentary that recorded Guangzhou Acrobatic Troupe’s (GAT) official touring performance in Hong Kong and produced collectively by Hong Kong leftist cultural workers during the height of the Cultural Revolution, the filmmakers made use of the camera’s bold selection to emphasize the entertaining and historical value of Chinese acrobatics (or "zaji"), while undercutting overt communist messages and revolutionary slogans. With a purpose of constructing a utopian image of the socialist PRC that had managed to unite its Hong Kong compatriots, local people’s voices were nevertheless absent from the silverscreen. Even so, the PRC’s audiovisual propaganda in terms of zaji diplomacy was more convincing than those pro-American individual commercial circuses from Southeast Asia and Japan, and most importantly, troupes sponsored by the ROC regime in Taiwan, which merely relied on stage performances to conduct “popular diplomacy” rather than the affective medium of audiovisual media. By tracing the transnational circulation of Chinese acrobatics under socialist reform, this paper seeks to address strategies for the PRC to conduct global cultural propaganda in the early Cold War period, as well as contestations of different political parties within Sinophone communities in East and Southeast Asia.enConference Paper