The Happy Builders of New China Images of Chinese Revolutionary Youth in the 1950s Italian Accounts of the People’s Republic

This paper offers an outline of the narratives and perceptions by Italian travellers about the life and social position of Chinese youth in the People’s Republic during the 1950s. Its goal is to explore how the image of Chinese youth under Socialism produced by transnational propaganda in the Socialist cosmopolis and circulating abroad intertwined with the factual observations and the personal assumptions of the Italian intellectuals on the revolutionary social transformation of China in that period. It argues that, although travellers were impressed by the apparent protagonism of the younger generation in the construction of Socialism in China in those years and read it as a symbol of new China, they also speculated on how the conditions of youth after the revolution had really implied a dramatic change in their social and cultural power and in their political emancipation.