Simone de Beauvoir spent six weeks in Mao Zedong's newly founded People's Republic of China (PRC) between September and October 1955. She brought with her a ‘vision of rose’ so ruddy and mental baggage so heavy that, for one severe critic, the infant country became a ‘dreamscape suffused with […] passion for an unworldly purity’. New China was exceptionally bright, as Beauvoir recounted in the 500-page ‘essay on China’ La longue marche (The Long March) published two years after the trip. Meryl Altman, meanwhile, describes Beauvoir's trip as the story of ‘an honest failure’ but a ‘more interesting’ one. This assessment illuminates and understands failure as a productive experience, bringing out more good than would have been possible without it. In what follows, I will focus on Beauvoir's China travels in deed and in words as the site and sight of displaced meanings. I aim to examine this Sino-French encounter through a prism: the circumstances that dictated the beginning of the travels, on the one hand, and the specific contexts of travel writing, at once Chinese and French, on the other. In a sociopolitical space and language outside its original appearance, the story of Beauvoir in China is contingent on the needs and expectations of the Chinese scene. My analysis will end with a note on the critical legacy of Beauvoir in the world, underlining how Beauvoir's works are international in scope and transcultural in nature. With China as a subject-in-process and Chinese feminism a subject of interest always on trial, I want to draw attention to Ai Xiaoming, recipient of the 2010 Prix Simone de Beauvoir pour la liberté des femmes (Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women's Freedom). Currently censored and under state surveillance, Ai is barred by the PRC from travelling to France to receive the Beauvoir award.