Revolution from the margins: Uruguayan New Left narratives on the People's Republic of China (1950s-1960s)

This article explores narratives on the People's Republic of China created by intellectuals of the New Left in Uruguay during the 1950s and 1960s. The Chinese Revolution inspired new interest and began a period of exchange of ideas, publications, and people between Latin America and China, especially among leftists. However, historiography mostly focused on the impacts of the Cuban Revolution in the formation of the New Left in Latin America and has so far downplayed the role of Asian and African experiences in this process. The article includes China in the Uruguayan debates and argues that the crisis faced by the country during the period allowed leftists to perceive it as a possible inspiration for the transformation they sought. Furthermore, the crisis in international communism caused by the Sino-Soviet split opened the possibility of China being perceived as an experience distinct from the Soviet Union. This left had an ambiguous relationship with China marked by international and internal factors, and the operation to approximate the two countries was complex. It was viable because leftists interpreted the Chinese Revolution according to categories that were disseminated, such as antiimperialism, development and Third Position/Third World.