Soon after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), youth
exchanges came to be a major part of the Chinese campaign to reach out and
influence the people of other nations. Despite the growing scholarly discussion
regarding the role of people-to-people diplomacy and external propaganda in
China's foreign policy, so far no direct attention has been paid to the
Chinese Communist Party's efforts to institutionalize youth exchanges and
use them as a tool to promote the new Chinese government's foreign
relations. This article locates the position of young people within the
PRC's people-to-people diplomacy. It attempts to explore youth exchanges
with the West in the early years of the Cold War by focusing on relations
between Italian and Chinese youth groups in the 1950s. Relying mainly on
unexplored archival material and memoirs, this article documents contacts and
exchanges between adult-led youth organizations and their members, and shows how
Italian left-wing party-affiliated youth groups and Soviet-dominated
transnational organizations provided important channels for Sino-Italian
encounters and for building long-lasting contacts among potential future leaders
of these countries.