Learning from Elder Brother

Soviet ideas, experts, and exports arrived in increasing numbers throughout the mid-1950s to a revolutionary China in the midst of land reform and new nationality policies. For academics this "leaning to one side" meant the wholesale replacement of the Western model with the Soviet one. "In the 1950s," one ethnologist recalled, "we criticized the West and followed the Soviet Union. But just as we had earlier done with the West, we swallowed whole the Soviet approach and uncritically applied it to our own fields."