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DFG Research Training Group 2571 "Empires. Dynamic Change, Temporality and Post-Imperial Orders"
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Ricardo Rudas Meo

Portrait of Ricardo Rudas Meo, doctoral student, wearing a light blue shirt, in front of a blue background

Ricardo Rudas Meo

Doc

PhD project: “Breaking Through the Language Barrier. (Mis)communication in Chinese Communist State Building in the 1950s Sino-Tibetan Borderlands”

My project investigates how language barriers shaped the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) state- and nation-building enterprise in the southwestern Sino-Tibetan borderlands—broadly the area then comprising the province of Xikang—during the 1950s, the first decade of CCP rule in this ethnoculturally diverse region. I analyze how the CCP communicated (or failed to communicate) with local communities as it worked to establish authority amidst language barriers, misunderstandings, and mistranslations. I aim to provide a fresh perspective on the CCP’s gargantuan state-building project on a periphery of the former Qing-imperial geo-body by approaching it from what must have posed a constant challenge for the Party at the grassroots level: the effective communication across language barriers.

The CCP’s project of imposition onto existing societies and transforming traditional cultures to create the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was a fundamentally communicative effort. It required the Party to make itself understood, to convey its ideology and expectations, to explain, legitimize, and promote its policies among local communities—an unavoidably linguistic challenge, especially in the non-Chinese speaking borderlands of the envisioned nation state. Communication and national integration were, thus, interrelated. Hence, to understand the state-building process in the peripheries of the young PRC, the question of how communication functioned on the ground is central: Did state agents speak local languages or did they communicate via reliable (or unreliable) interpreters? Were state agents arriving to the borderlands trained in local languages (and able to master them), or were seemingly loyal locals chosen to learn Chinese and trained to serve the Party-state? Through my research, I argue that language barriers emerged as a decelerating force for the CCP—one that seemingly resisted quick resolutions and constrained the envisioned pace of transformation.

I utilize a heterogeneous set of sources, including materials produced during the 1950s and in later decades, especially the post-Mao era. Retrospective sources include “cultural and historical materials” (wenshi ziliao), local gazetteers (difangzhi), memoirs, and biographies. Contemporary materials from the 1950s encompass archival documents gathered during field trips in China, newspapers, governmental documents in published source collections, cadre journals, language-learning materials, and other reference works intended for state agents working in the former province of Xikang (later, western Sichuan). More broadly, I am interested in the language dimension in civilizing missions, moments of first encounter, and in empire-to-nation-state transformations.

Publications