https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2019/12/22/how-cold-war-rivalry-helped-launch-the-chinese-computer/

It was the summer of 1959, and the United States needed a Cold War to win. In 1957, the Soviet bloc scored a major technological victory with Sputnik 1. The next year, China’s Communist leadership launched the sweeping, and ultimately devastating, Great Leap Forward. In the spring of 1959 in Cuba, Fidel Castro’s guerrillas forced president Fulgencio Batista into exile. The US needed to recapture the momentum and demonstrate that it was still at the helm of world affairs. The plan: president Dwight D Eisenhower was to unveil the world’s first Chinese computer.

The invention of the first Chinese computer would be a major victory, a ‘gift’ from capitalism to the Chinese people. It would score a ‘Free World’ technological and cultural victory, while also raising the possibility of a new infrastructure for the global dissemination and translation of Chinese-language material. Whoever possessed such a device could flood the world with Chinese texts at a rate never before seen – potentially a major propaganda advantage. Moreover, for the Chinese language and its speakers, who numbered over 1 billion, it would have inaugurated a new age of information technology that many thoughts were only possible for the alphabetic world. It would mean that the Chinese language was not ‘backward’ in the way that many had claimed.