Sino‐Mexican Encounters Before the ‘Diplomatic Opening’: Exhibition Diplomacy and Grassroots Friendship in the 1960s

Abstract During the 1960s, Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) embraced Chinese overtures for a commercial opening as consistent with its anti‐imperialist posture, thereby foreshadowing the diplomatic opening to China in 1972. Yet this professed ideological pluralism was eclipsed by an underlying allegiance to the United States' anti‐communist undertaking, as shown by the PRI's response to Mexican militants who had taken inspiration from Maoist China. This article untangles such tensions from two angles. First, it examines the staging of Communist China's 1963 Economic and Commercial Exhibition in Mexico City – the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. In this context, it traces the grassroots diplomacy and cultural activities of the China‐supported Mexican Society of Friendship with People's China. Acting as pioneering interlocutors between the two nations, its members participated in the Chinese Exhibition and frequently travelled to Beijing. Domestically, they disseminated ideas about socialist developmentalism inspired by the Chinese example, often challenging the PRI's rhetoric of ‘revolutionary nationalism’. They thus occupied a position that did not fit within the Cold War ideological binary. In a second step, the article shifts attention to the state repression of Maoist insurgents, as incidents of detainment by security forces mounted in 1967 when Mexico's Cold War escalated. With these anti‐establishment sparks ultimately extinguished, the counterinsurgent PRI regime had effectively delayed Mexico's democratic transition. By analysing these cases altogether, the article frames the visions of transnational leftist groups as counterpoints to the PRI‐dominated state‐building, while highlighting the tensions between different Sino‐Mexican ventures.