Using the respective intellectual engagements of Dallas Smythe,Wilbur Schramm, and Dan Schiller (hence “3S”) with China from the 1970s to the present as points of entry, this article applies the transcultural political economy of communication framework to explicate both the transcultural and transnational knowledge/power dynamics between China and the West and the concomitant domestic academic politics in the development of Chinese communication scholarship. While demonstrating how mainstream American communication research as represented by Wilbur Schramm has had a profound impact in undermining China’s indigenous Marxist journalism scholarship and shaping the development of communication scholarship in the reform-era China, this article also recovers the “lost” history of Dallas Smythe’s research trips to China in the 1970s and underscores the signifcance of Dan Schiller’s ongoing critical analysis of a globalizing digital capitalism in which China is playing an increasingly important role. In demonstrating the “multiple realities” that have been constitutive of China’s academic exchanges with the West, this article argues for the continuing relevance of Dallas Symthe-inspired research questions regarding the possibility of developing a socialist knowledge/power paradigm as the only viable challenge against the universalizing pretensions and impositions of capitalistic development paradigm.