Translation during the Cold War has attracted increasing attention from translation scholars for highlighting the important role of ideology and politics during a period that is often regarded as the birth of the modern field of Translation Studies (see Baer, 2011; Rubin, 2012; Arzık-Erzurumlu, 2020; Elias-Bursać, 2020; Haddadian-Moghaddam, 2020; Sicari, 2020; Baer, 2021). During this politically and ideologically charged period, translation was an instrument of propaganda and cultural diplomacy on both sides of the Iron Curtain, used to validate and popularize ideologies, to prevent the circulation of opposing ideologies, and to win people’s “hearts and minds” (Iber, 2019). There are, however, few studies addressing the context of East Asia, especially Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. During the Cold War years, the United States of America (USA) sided with Taiwan while the mainland initially sided with the Soviet Union, although the relationship between mainland China and the Soviet Union later deteriorated. The dissertation traces the complex role of translation in the Cold War context of East Asia in regard to two influential French writers of the postwar period, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, considered key figures in the philosophical movement known as Existentialism. During the Second World War, both Sartre and Camus fought against fascist countries, but during the Cold War, Camus sided with the USA and rejected communism, while Sartre’s relationship with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) grew more amicable. This research investigates the following three questions: 1) What patronage networks shaped the introduction of Sartre and Camus in mainland China and Taiwan during the Cold War? 2) What public narratives were generated about these writers in mainland China and Taiwan during the Cold War, and how were those public narratives shaped by the meta-narratives of the Cold War?; and 3) How were texts by Sartre and Camus translated in mainland China and Taiwan during the Cold War? The researcher uses actor-network theory (ANT) and patronage to address question 1, Baker’s (2006) narrative theory to address question 2, and Baker’s (2006) selective appropriation from which the researcher derives selection and deselection and critical discourse analysis (CDA) to address question 3. This dissertation uses the terms “introduction” and “introduce” in a broad sense, to cover translation as well as the paratextual material, such as introductions and critical essays, that discusses Sartre, Camus and their works. This research relies primarily on archival material (correspondence between United States Information Service (USIS) based in Taipei and the CIA, financial reports, government materials, speeches, and other related archival materials), peritexual material (prefaces, introductions, book covers, and other peritextual materials in relevant journals, books, and encyclopedias), and epitextual material (such as, journal and newspaper articles that introduced Sartre and Camus to Chinese readers and interviews.) and conduct critical discourse analysis (CDA) and narrative analysis. The research methods shed light on the interplay between translation, ideology, and politics in the specific context of the Cold War.