Despite that term’s ubiquity, however, very little scholarship has taken its political usages seriously. Instead of seeing this diplomatic category as either empty rhetoric or manipulation, this panel takes seriously the PRC’s stance of pursuing friendship and its international repercussions by examining the different ways in which Chinese actors and their interlocutors in Asia, Africa, and beyond used the term. By exploring a diverse array of interactions, including academic studies, unofficial delegations, cultural production, and friendship association conferences, this panel seeks to expand our understandings of the PRC’s diplomacy towards the ‘Third World’ with an emphasis on intellectual, cultural, and social history. Doing so will shed light on the PRC’s international stature in the early Cold War, and the significance that such foreign ties had on domestic politics and knowledge production. Interactions with friends abroad could help clarify the importance of work at home, thus lending prestige to the Chinese revolutionary project. But friendship was by no means a unidirectional relationship. Marshaling evidence from state archives, institutional collections, oral histories, and musical productions across various countries, this panel’s presentations also seek to better understand the ways that diverse actors in African and Asian societies interpreted and contributed to the PRC’s revolutionary politics in the context of their own political projects. From the ‘Asian’ valences that friendship carried in India and the complex loyalties that it engendered in Cameroon to the sonic renderings of this friendship through various forms of media and American obsessions with understanding these relationships, this panel highlights how friendship offered a variety of strategic lens to actors operating both within and without the confines of the state. By doing so, it hopes to use friendship to tell a transnational story of the PRC’s efforts to challenge and co-opt geopolitical norms during the Cold War.