This paper re-examines the introduction and reinterpretation of socialist realism in China not as a straightforward product of Soviet export, but as a multi-layered process of transnational translation, ideological negotiation, and local adaptation. Drawing on literary research into translated Soviet theories, art journals, publishing histories, and institutional documents from the 1920s to the 1960s, I argue that socialist realism entered China as a fragmented and contested discourse well before it was codified as a Party-sanctioned method.

Early translations of Soviet cultural theory—often mediated via Japanese Marxist texts—rendered the term in Chinese as “new realism” or “the realism of socialism,” detaching it from its Soviet institutional roots and recasting it within a Chinese revolutionary and aesthetic framework. Even before the 1934 First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers officially sanctioned the method, Chinese intellectuals were engaging with Soviet debates on proletarian literature, realism, and the role of art in revolution.

In the Chinese art world of the 1950s, socialist realism was further reinterpreted through Maoist theory, traditional Chinese aesthetics, and localized pedagogical reforms. Rather than being passively received, the doctrine became a site of intellectual agency and creative negotiation.

By foregrounding these non-linear and multi-sourced trajectories, this paper contributes to efforts to decentre and decolonise the study of socialist art history. It challenges core-periphery models by highlighting the agency of so-called “peripheral” actors in shaping the cultural life of socialist internationalism, and highlights cultural exchanges within the Eastern bloc as key spaces of ideological and artistic production.