After the founding the People's Republic of China (PRC), the foreign-related cultural exchange work opened a new historical chapter, endowed with new meanings and contents. As a key component of China's overall foreign-related work and socialist culture and art cause, foreign-related cultural exchange was given top priority by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese government.

The three generations of central leader teams have all attached much importance to the work on foreign-related cultural tasks. In 1945, Mao Zedong noted, As to foreign culture, the exclusionism is wrong. (The right attitude should be to) absorb the progressive foreign culture as the mirror for developing Chinese new culture. In 1983, Deng Xiaoping pointed out that To adopt the economic policy of opening-up is right and deserves our persistent efforts. As well, foreign-related cultural exchanges need long-term development.

On the Sixth Plenary Session of the 14th Central Committee of the CPC, Jiang Zemin pointed out: It will have important influence on our socialist modernization to make broad exchanges on economy, trade, science, technology, education and culture with the rest of the world. In the report of the 15th Congress of the CPC, Jiang also noted: Chinese cultural development cannot go without the common achievement of human civilization. Based on the principle of self-concentration and using for us, (we should) develop various foreign-related cultural exchanges, absorb advantages of the rest of the cultures of the world, and demonstrate the achievements of Chinese cultural construction. (We shall be) persistent in resisting erosion of various corruptive ideology and culture. These important instructions not only clarify the direction of foreign-related cultural exchange, but also turn out the great encouragement and stimulus to the whole foreign-related cultural objective. For more than 40 years, Chinese foreign-related cultural exchange work was carried out in line with the foreign-related work principle of the CPC and the Chinese government. Adjustments have also been made to some specific policies concerning foreign-related cultural exchanges according to changes of international and domestic situations and the adjustment of our diplomacy policy and domestic cultural policy. Therefore, our foreign-related cultural exchanges have made remarkable achievements.