In the post-World War II era, it soon became clear that military force, diplomacy, and commerce were not themselves fully sufficient to advance an ambitious nation's interests on the international stage. At the height of the Cold War and continuing into the 1960s, as the US and the USSR emerged as the two competing global superpowers, the US sought to extend its power through the attractiveness of its popular culture – notably rock and roll and youth culture – while on the high culture side it promoted the abstract expressionism in the visual arts and modern dance as appealing markers of American cultural vibrancy. Joseph Nye, writing of America’s use of such cultural resources to generate a more favorable image of itself internationally, famously termed this ‘ability to attract’ ‘soft power’ (2004, p. 6). Nye's framework, which will be invoked in future chapters as well, is relevant in considering the resources that China, or the People's Republic of China (PRC), employed to win the hearts and minds of not just politicians, but ordinary citizens in the West from the 1970s onward.

Ten years after the death of the senior leaders of the revolution, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, China under Deng Xiaoping sought to embrace a kind of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ 中国特色社会主义, a concept that in practice came to mean a kind of state-directed capitalism.