Abstract: If twentieth-century Chinese culture can be seen as an intensification of a “short century” and a “long revolution,” then travel writing constituted a poetics of mobility in its genealogy of utopian geopolitical imaginations. This article focuses on Chinese writers’ visits to the Soviet Union in the 1940s, especially Guo Moruo’s tour (1945) and his writing of Sulian jixing (Travelogue of the Soviet Union, 1946). The revolutionary-romantic poet and historian Guo Moruo’s visit on the invitation of the USSR Academy of Sciences overlapped with the defeat of imperial Japan by the Allies, whereas novelist Mao Dun’s trip (1947) was accompanied by the escalation of the civil war back in China. Both leftist writers used their travel writings to intervene into the ongoing post-war debates about people’s democracy, the Stalinist model, and the looming Cold War. Their admiration of the Soviet accomplishments was formulated as a self-conscious defense of the socialist path, as the victory over fascism made Stalinism a realistic alternative to capitalist imperialism. But while their socialist imaginaries were shaped by Stalinism, both writers’ travel writings refused to see this model as the only approach of revolution and even contained implicit observations of the potential shortcomings of the Soviet model. My case study of Guo’s travel writing thus shows the complexity of Chinese leftism as an open-ended historical praxis and global geopolitical remapping.