On December 22, 1949, the People’s Daily, by this time the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, made its first reference to Christmas since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The mention came in a poem honouring Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin on his 70th birthday. Stalin was painted as a proletarian Santa Claus bearing gifts for the downtrodden of the world.

December Twenty-First,

Is the day you were born,

And for all the people of the world it is “Christmas.”

Comrade Stalin,

You deliver precious gifts to the world,

You offer wheat and warm coats to the hungry and cold,

You call the exiles home,

You give culture to the benighted,

You liberate those who have lost their freedom!

The December 22, 1949, edition of the People’s Daily runs a poem in honour of Stalin’s 70th birthday called “We Thank You! We Long For You!”

If the Soviet Christmas invited expressions of warmth and comradeship, the American Christmas was a convenient symbol of capitalistic greed and the misery it wrought.

On December 15, 1950, poet and essayist Fang Lingru (方令孺), who had studied in the 1920s at both Washington State University and the University of Wisconsin, wrote a reflection in the People’s Daily called “How I Witnessed ‘The American Way of Life.’” Fang recalled feeling, as her steamer pulled slowly away upon her departure from America, that she would never visit the wretched country again.

Why did I have no feelings whatsoever for America? It was not without reason. For six years the American life I had seen was vulgar, prejudiced, cold, callous and apathetic, a frail soap bubble that might burst with a puff of breeze, a vast emptiness dazzling with its pretence.

In New York, Fang wrote, even the sun and air were controlled by the capitalists. Those who were wealthy could afford ample space with decent light. The poor, meanwhile, endured dark and cramped conditions.

She wrote of neighbours “wasting away from hunger” and struggling to find work. “At Christmas, their most important holiday, they can’t even return home to gather as a family,” she said.

In the 1950s, as China became mired in the conflict on the Korean peninsula, Christmas came to represent the humanity of China’s fighting force, the People’s Volunteer Army, against the cold mass of “the invading American forces” and their capitalist masters.

On December 30, 1950, the People’s Daily reported that the People’s Volunteer Army had arranged a Christmas party for American and British prisoners of war:

Even though China’s People’s Volunteer Army doesn’t believe in Christianity, the [soldiers] decorated the scene according to Christian custom. As soon as the POWs entered the venue, they were awed by the English banners, and by a pair of “Christmas trees” adorned with red candles and silver alarm bells symbolising freedom.

A “42 year-old” prisoner identified as Olsen was quoted by the People’s Daily as saying that his treatment as a captive by the Chinese was far better than he had experienced in Germany during the Second World War. “The Germans are Christians,” Olsen reportedly said, “but they didn’t allow us to have a merry Christmas.”

News of the trial of Master Sgt. William H. Olsen for “collaborating with Chinese Communists” is reported in the New York Times on January 13, 1955.

This, in fact, was Master Sergeant William Olsen, the soldier later put on trial in the United States for collaborating with “the Reds.” Olsen’s words in the People’s Daily, which he later disavowed, were critical of capitalism and American imperialism. “When I return home this time, I’ll no longer serve as a soldier. If the big shots insist on going to war again, I’ll tell them to take up arms and go themselves!”

When news around Christmas involved members of the Soviet Bloc, the general themes in the People’s Daily centred on peace, unity and friendship. On Christmas Day in 1956, the newspaper reported that “children in Beijing” had planned a lavish Christmas celebration for visiting children from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany in the Beijing Children’s Palace.

A large Christmas tree in the lobby was festooned with coloured lights. The curtains were decorated with fairytale deer, rabbits and bears. The lights went down, and the children were treated to a private screening of the animation film Thank You Little Cat as they feasted on roasted peanuts and chestnuts.

The official animation film Thank You Little Cat, produced in Shanghai in 1950.

In America, meanwhile, Christmas kept its patina of gloom. On January 16, 1957, as a violent backlash against the Hundred Flowers Movement was brewing and China was quietly careening toward the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the People’s Daily rejoiced in a grim story from the New York Times.

According to a report in the “New York Times” on December 27 last year, 883 people died in American during the Christmas holiday through various accidents. Among these, there were 705 deaths attributed to car accidents, 54 to fires, and 123 deaths from other accidents. The report said this was the highest number of deaths in the history of the Christmas holiday.

American economic miseries were chronicled again on Christmas day in 1957, as the People’s Daily reported on the 1956 tour through the Soviet Union of the Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess. The tour, which had performed in Leningrad and Kiev, was by many accounts an outstanding success, but the CCP’s newspaper focused on the tough lives cast members found upon their return to the United States. “[Their] livelihoods were unassured, they were completely frustrated,” the People’s Daily reported, “and they spent Christmas in despair.”

It’s not clear where the People’s Daily obtained its information about the miserable cast members of Porgy and Bess, but one of the chroniclers of the tour itself was the writer Truman Capote, who had joined the trip at the expense of The New Yorker alongside Leonore Gershwin, the wife of the composer.

Truman Capote’s account of Porgy and Bess performed in the Soviet Union appears in The New Yorker on October 27, 1956.

In any case, the hypocrisy of American elites was on full display. Here were artists, lauded during their tour of the Soviet Union, returning to lives of squalor in the world’s richest nation. “And yet,” the People’s Daily reported, “the American president, his eyes open and staring, said in his Christmas message that the people of America led ‘prosperous,’ ‘peaceful’ and ‘joyful’ lives.”

In a 1950s Communist forerunner of the mic drop, the newspaper added with a vehemence: “Eisenhower’s so-called ‘Christmas message’ should be called an April Fool’s Day message.”

By Christmas of 1957, nearly 300,000 artists and other intellectuals in China, including the writer Ding Ling, had been swept up in the persecution of the Anti-Rightist Movement.