Brecht appropriated freely from other cultures and times. This is no where more apparent than in his borrowings from the Chinese arts tradition. On a visit to Moskow in 1935, Brecht saw a performance by the great Chinese actor, Mei-Fantang, with which he was deeply impressed.  In his biography Brecht, A Literary Life (2014) Stephen Parker explains the matter thusly: Brecht identifed in the highly conscious attitude of the Chinese actor the awareness that he was performing a role, not embodying it, and that his intention to appear strange, indeed disconcerting to the audience, lent his presentation of everyday actions a truly arresting impact.  It was important to Brecht to differentiate a Distancing Effect from Stanislavsky's mode of acting, which was based on the actor's intense identification with his subject.

Similarly, Brecht borrowed from the Chinese tradition to offset criticism of the Moskow clique of György Lukács, Alfred Kurella and others, who were plainly out to nail him as not being a true enough Marxist, but a revisionist and Trokskyist. The accused him of being a ‘formalist,’ an artist who uses avant-garde forms, and does not promote true Marxist virtues in his art.  In terms of his dramas, Brecht outflanked them by writing pieces such as The Private Life of the Master Race, (Furcht und Elend des dritten Reiches), which because of its quality, and its impeccable anti-fascist theme, put an end to this discussion, one that might have had serious repercussions for Brecht’s career and life.   Similarly, his borrowings from the tradition of Chinese verse were not arbitrary and casual, but had the intention of making pointed comments on existing political problems in his own life.  Again, Parker: Po Chu -I, who twice sent into exile, considers appropriate forms of social behaviour, combining observation and reflection with a sharp eye for  social injustice and paradox.

Many of these poems are translations of translations, namely material that was brought to Brecht's attention by Elizabeth Hauptmann from the classic work by Arthur Waley,  A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems  (1918).  Brecht translated them into German with Elizabeth Hauptmann's help.  He revistited all of this after WWII as well.