In 1956 Sassu participated in a trip to China at the head of a delegation of Italian artists which included Antonietta Raphael Mafai, Agenore Fabbri, Giulio Turcato, Tono Zancanaro, and Ampelio Tettamanti. During the trip he made a number of drawings inspired by the Chinese landscape, exhibiting them on his return in the gallery La Colonna in Milan. The trip also suggested to him this large painting The New China, realist in tone, expressing all his enthusiasm for Chinese society, which had come out of a period of harsh fighting and at the time was undergoing a radical reconstruction. Compositionally, with the figures of men, women, and children presented frontally, moving forward toward the spectator, the work could recall Pellizza da Volpedo’s Quarto Stato.