Unlike France, Great Britain, or Sweden, Switzerland could not boast of having an ancient Sinological tradition. Nevertheless, at the end of the 1930s, Oriental Studies began with Eduard Horst von Tscharner, who founded the Société suisse des Amis de l’Extrême-Orient (Swiss Society of Friends of the Far East) with the help of the federal judge Robert Fazy, and who later established the first Swiss chair of Sinology at the University of Zurich (UNIZH) in 1950. Subsequently, the Sinologist Robert Paul Kramers took over the presidency of what had become the Société suisse d’études asiatiques (Swiss Society for Asian Studies), and in 1964 he established the East Asia Seminar at UNIZH long before the discipline spread to French-speaking Switzerland.¹⁴ In the meantime, Swiss Sinologists, such as Paul Demiéville, pursued brilliant careers abroad, and it was not until 1971 that a Centre for Documentation and Research on Asia was established at the Graduate Institute of International Studies (IUHEI) in Geneva, under the direction of Harish Kapur, Gilbert Étienne, and Alexandre Casella. Finally, in 1972, the first Chinese History course was set up at the University of Geneva by Jean-François Billeter, followed in 1976 by a first course entirely dedicated to the Chinese language.

Furthermore, an important Sino-international library was founded in Geneva in 1933 by people close to Chiang Kai-shek.¹⁵ This library provided scientific information on China for Westerners as well as Western works on Europe for the Chinese, until it was moved to Uruguay following Switzerland’s recognition of the PRC in 1950.¹⁶ Still, among anti-communist circles, some university libraries such as the Osteuropa Bibliothek (Eastern Europe Library) of the University of Bern have also collected important documentation dedicated to Asia and China.¹⁷ In another field, the Rietberg Museum in Zurich and the Alfred and Eugénie Baur Foundation in Geneva have gathered important collections of Chinese art, thanks to donations from personalities such as Eduard von der Heydt, Charles A. Drenowatz, Pierre Uldry, Franco Vannotti, and above all Uli Sigg, who became Swiss Ambassador to China in 1995.

In the media, after Walter Bosshard’s reports on China in the 1930s, few Swiss journalists ventured beyond the Bamboo Curtain.¹⁸ Nevertheless, in the small community of European China watchers, a few editors like Lily Abegg and Fernand Gigon covered events in the PRC, keeping their distance from the “Mao fever” that took over the French intellectual landscape around 1968. The Swiss press remained mostly impervious to Mao Zedong Thought, and journalists such as Alexandre Casella (Journal de Genève), Christian Sulser (Radio Suisse Romande), and Ernst Kux (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) in particular, who were labelled “Asia specialists”, were always critical of Maoist China.

While a first delegation of journalists led by Georges Duplain (director of the Swiss Telegraphic Agency) was able to go to China in 1972,¹⁹ it was only from 1978 onwards that the Sino-Swiss media meetings increased. Then, the television program Temps présent was finally able to beam back its own images of the PRC and newspapers like 24 Heures sent correspondents to Beijing. For many years, the circulation of information about the PRC in Switzerland was, thus, confined to a few narrow channels, mostly reserved for a small elite, of which the Chinesisch-Schweizerischen Gesellschaft (Chinese-Swiss Society) was a “select” example.

Officially founded on 6 March 1945 in Lucerne, it aimed to develop cultural and scientific relations between Switzerland and China through conferences, museum visits, and study tours. Its president for 25 years, Dr. Alfred Gigon, had founded the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences and the Swiss Tropical Institute in 1943. The founding members of the society, which was headed by pharmaceutical company bosses, were mainly professors, national councillors, and entrepreneurs from the chemical industry. The society was dedicated to Chinese culture and civilisation and was supported by specialists such as the Sinologists Norbert Meienberger and Harro von Senger as well as former Swiss Ambassadors to China such as Hans Keller and Erwin Schurtenberger.

The society always maintained its distance from the PRC government and lost many members as the country erupted into the Cultural Revolution. It became dormant due to an ageing committee in the 1960s, but was revived in 1970 by a new president, Victor Umbricht, who changed the name of the organisation to Schweizerisch-chinesische Gesellschaft (Swiss-Chinese Society).²⁰ It remained in the hands of executives of the Ciba-Geigy Group and was then managed by Hans-Uli Amman from 1986 to 1991. While it had reached its nadir in 1971 with only about 30 members, it succeeded in attracting nearly 400 during the 1980s by working in close collaboration with Swiss diplomacy. Thus, it took several decades for the country’s most influential circles to begin a rapprochement with the PRC and to open the way for Sino-Swiss exchanges, particularly in the academic field.

Between 1949 and 1980, less than 300 Chinese attended Swiss universities, despite the importance for Beijing of the Genève internationale and its School of Interpreters. These students, who were strictly supervised by the PRC Embassy and Consulate, were suspected of espionage and perceived as a potential threat by the Swiss Confederation.²¹ In 1965, the year of the first xenophobic initiative by the National Aktion,²² Bern frequently refused them entry to Switzerland “because of the overpopulation of foreigners”.²³ It was only after the authorities realised how these young Chinese lived in isolation, in order to avoid any contact with capitalist ideology, that their fears allayed.

In the early 1970s, after the Swiss Embassy in Beijing reminded the FPD that it was “better to impose one’s own policy than to be subjected to that of others”²⁴ and especially following the Sino-American rapprochement of 1972, the Swiss Confederation tried to catch up in the field of scientific exchanges with China by setting up scholarships with the help of Professor R. P. Kramers. The presence of Chinese students in Switzerland represented an opportunity for institutions like the IUHEI to position themselves as training centres for the future elites of the PRC. Since then, the Swiss National Science Foundation has also begun to encourage the development of Chinese Studies in Switzerland by allowing young Swiss citizens to go to China.

In 1963, Jean François Billeter was the first Swiss student in the PRC before pursuing a career as a Sinologist.²⁵ In 1965, he explained in a letter to his relatives that he had intended to become a cultural attaché, but had given up for fear “of having to spend [his] days translating Chinese newspapers, of serving as an interpreter for all the Swiss journalists passing through, of having to attend diplomatic cocktail parties and of losing all contact with Chinese intellectuals”.²⁶ In the early 1970s, as part of the evolution of diplomatic personnel towards increased diversity, the FPD, which was lacking Chinese-speaking personnel, had to recognise its “great need for knowledge about China”.²⁷

Swiss scientists expressed their disappointment that the PRC was failing in its duty of reciprocity, since Beijing received very few Swiss scholarship holders in relation to the number of Chinese students that the Swiss Confederation welcomed. The Swiss students also had to tolerate difficult conditions and were advised to “play the game of the ‘China-friendly’ foreign student to the hilt”,²⁸ since, as the Swiss Embassy noted, “many students who have several years of Sinology behind them return to Europe in a state of more or less pronounced disarray”.²⁹ Nevertheless, these exchanges became commonplace in the 1980s, making the PRC lose much of its exoticism.

From the perspective of Swiss elites, cultural relations with China were very limited until the 1980s. Overall, the attitude of the Swiss Confederation was characterised by its herd mentality, as it waited for the resumption of the dialogue between the United States and the PRC in the early 1970s and then for the Chinese political and economic shift...