Between “Yellow” and “Red”: Stereotypes and Racial Discourses in 1950s Italian Narratives of Communist China

Taking the magazine Il Ponte in 1956 and the travelogues of the newspaper Corriere della Sera’s journalist Virgilio Lilli as case studies, this chapter analyzes some aspects of the discourse on the People’s Republic of China during the early Cold War. After the fall of Fascism, racism became a political and cultural taboo in Italy, and the notion of race, which had supported discriminatory and colonial policies before the Second World War, mostly disappeared. However, the recent reemergence of anti-Chinese racist discourses in Italy requires a better understanding of the continuities and discontinuities in the Italian attitude towards China along the twentieth century. If during the Cold War the opinions towards the People’s Republic of China were mainly determined by ideology, a reading of travel literature reveals how Orientalist stereotypes and Eurocentric prejudices inherited from the colonial era continued to shape the perception of China in spite of political differences. In the writings of progressive and conservative travelers as well, these stereotypes contributed to “racialize” China in the eyes of the Italian public opinion.