Malcolm Deas Fund recipient: Yixin Tian

The Latin American Centre (LAC) and St Antony’s College launched the Malcolm Deas Fund on the occasion of the Centre’s 50th anniversary to strengthen the mission of the LAC in promoting teaching and research on Colombia and Latin America in Oxford. The Fund allows the LAC and St Antony’s to support a wide range of academic activities. In the academic year 2024-25, the Fund was awarded to several recipients, including Yixin Tian. Yixin is a DPhil student in History and at Corpus Christi College. She has kindly provided a blog summarising her reseach which was partially funded by the Malcolm Deas Fund. 

Title: Third World friendships in the Mexican Global 1970s: A Multi-archival Research Experience

By Yixin Tian

In March 1975, when Vice-Premier of the People’s Republic of China, Chen Yonggui (Chen Yung-kuei), arrived in Mexico City, peasant leaders hailed him as a living reminder of their own nation’s ‘glorious revolutionary tradition’. Chen, celebrated as the architect of China’s Socialist agriculture, brought with him not only the agrarian philosophies of the famous Dazhai (Tachai) model but also a favourable prospect for Third World friendships. To welcome his visit, the Mexican Society of Friendship with People’s China organised a ‘PRC Film Week’ featuring screenings of Chinese revolutionary cinema.

In this new phase of China’s international engagement, the export of guerrillas and emancipatory revolutions was replaced by more intangible cultural influences. Transnational grassroots networks like the Mexican friendship society played an increasingly pivotal role in bringing about a rapprochement with China. Through public lectures and cultural events, they popularised the ideas of ‘Third World Marxism’ and opposed US imperialism, channelling radical internationalisms inspired by Maoist China into domestic political struggles. Their activities, closely monitored by the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) state, have left behind the archival traces that today make such histories accessible to us.

This summer, thanks to the generous support of the Rothermere American Institute Research Grant, the Colin Matthew Fund, and the Malcolm Deas Fund, I spent six weeks in Mexico and the United States gathering primary sources for my PhD project. My research explores the diplomatic and political history of Mexico during the presidency of Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–1976). Specifically, I examine the administration’s repressive handling of the ‘left-wing problem’ in contrast to its embrace of ideological pluralism abroad, most visibly in its opening to the Socialist Third World. I argue that this revolutionary foreign policy often served to mask the regime’s reactionary instincts and complicity with US anti-Communist undertakings.

To read the full blog, please click here.