Introduction
On 8 August 1963, Mao Zedong released the first of two official declarations in support of US black freedom movements. Intended as an appeal to global revolutionaries to coalesce around the cause of African American activists, his ‘Statement Calling the World's People to Unite in Opposition to the Racial Discrimination of U.S. Imperialism’ called for ‘workers, peasants … enlightened persons of all colours in the world’ to condemn the farce of the Kennedy Administration in its advocacy of ‘civil rights’.Footnote 1 This proclamation encapsulated China's approach towards African American freedom movements during the tumultuous early 1960s: elucidating the ravages of US white supremacy and emphasizing the class nature of racial divisions, all the while exhorting violent revolution.Footnote 2 Staged gatherings of ordinary Chinese citizens and international allies, many of which will be discussed in this study, further affirmed this national policy. Two weeks after Mao's initial pronouncement, for example, a ‘Support Black Struggles Poetry Recitation Conference’ attracted more than 1,000 participants to Capital Theatre in Beijing, where an international cast of poetry enthusiasts from countries such as Vietnam, Sudan, Ghana, and New Zealand shared their admiring lyrics for African American activism.Footnote 3 Within China, the US black freedom movements had morphed into an opportunity to indict the historical travesties of a racist US monopoly capitalism, as well as an emblem of courageous physical struggle that was at once anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
Recent scholarship has established the global context and reverberations of the US civil rights movement.Footnote 4 The plurality of this research, however, has tended to favour US perspectives and state-level relations, and does not yet explain the intensive campaigns situated outside of the United States of America that maintained tenuous interracial and transnational solidarities. This article shifts the vantage point away from the nuances of US diplomacy and politics, centring instead on the domestic sphere of the People's Republic of China (PRC), as it construed and recast the images and stories of US campaigns for racial equality. This focus on China during the period between the Sino-Soviet Split and the Cultural Revolution will highlight the pathways by which African American social movements—their symbolic meanings and political significations—presented a critical opportunity to chart new global identities and cement cross-group solidarities within the emerging nation.Footnote 5 A number of scholars have brought to light the active African American efforts to engage the PRC during the Cold War, especially at the level of intellectual cross-pollination and transnational political solidarity. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, a wave of black theorists and activists—W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, Robert F. and Mabel Williams, Vicki Garvin, Huey P. Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver, among others—perceived in China a crystalline remaking of Marxism for the Third World.Footnote 6 Published in late 2014, Robeson Taj Frazier's The East Is Black marked the first book-length examination of this phenomenon, grappling with the contradictions at the heart of this Cold War relationship. In his conclusion, Frazier notes that the deep mapping of Chinese responses to African American activism remains to be done, writing: ‘While this book has mainly been concerned with black radical imaginings of China, an interesting question is how did the corresponding side of these relations—Chinese citizens—alternatively imagine and represent the Black Freedom Struggle?’Footnote 7 Indeed, fewer works have taken as a main subject the non-US engagements of black internationalist ideals and actors: their depictions in local press, representations in national media, and receptions on the ground.Footnote 8
Writing against the conventional grain that understands the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an essentially national event, Zachary Scarlett argues that the communist party ‘amalgamated [global symbols] with familiar Maoist codes in order to produce an easily accessible knowledge of the outside world that could also legitimate power in China’.Footnote 9 Incorporating Scarlett's notion of ‘global narratives’ as objects of domestic consumption, this article addresses the historical and cultural revisionism employed in the Chinese imagination of US black revolutionary identities, while fleshing out the intricate discourses of race and class at the core of China's purposive self-fashioning. I will probe the process by which ‘race and racial justice became’, as Scarlett identifies, ‘essential tropes … in the Cultural Revolution’.Footnote 10 In doing so, my interpretation of race and class discourse in post-1949 China challenges Frank Dikötter's proposition that, during this period, the ‘artificial dichotomization between Chinese and Westerns in biological terms of “race” was merely reformulated in social terms of class’.Footnote 11 Rather, I argue, the Chinese narrations of African American history, politics, and culture represent a peculiar moment in which the PRC displayed a penetrating and sensationalized understanding of race and racism in world history and affairs. Race did not merely become subsumed under categories of class. It emerged as a political weapon in its own right, the foundation of alternative narratives that affirmed and substantiated class analysis. Through the lens of race, the PRC presented itself as the foil to the United States of America and the Soviet Union—the only major international player to bear the scars of colonization, perceive the nuances of racial oppression, and fully support African American revolution.
The primary contradiction seemingly embedded within Chinese socialist understandings of the US race problem, upon closer examination, actually stands at the core of an intentional political logic. As the PRC laid out the dynamics of racial hierarchy within the United States of America and represented itself as the champion of racial liberation, time and again, it affirmed Mao's directive that ‘race struggle is class struggle’. Reading between the lines, however, reveals a rhetorical and interpretative strategy that was not nearly so reductive. In effect, the PRC acknowledged and denunciated the origins and ramifications of racism while also harnessing that insight to a broader campaign for global socialism, the achievement of which would be the sole and inevitable path towards dissolving racial inequities. In deploying sensitive readings of race, the PRC bolstered its credentials as a post-colonial state uniquely attuned to African American struggles—one that already had carved out a time-tested path to liberation. Chinese press, officials, and representatives consistently referenced semi-colonialism in pre-revolutionary China in comparison to African American experiences in the present, thereby heightening the desirability of the Chinese political trajectory: working-class revolution as an antidote to the abuses of racial capitalism.
This article focuses on the five years leading up to the Cultural Revolution, which officially began in 1966. It was in this formative moment that the PRC crystallized its attitudes, policies, and overtures towards US black freedom struggles—approaches that would also define its developing-world outlook in the years ahead. The following three sections explicate the primary mechanisms of solidarity-making. First, I explore the consistent news reporting on and framing US civil rights movements as righteous, violent class rebellion in the Maoist paradigm. Stories rolled out of imminent victory in the US black revolution, fought out tooth-and-nail on the streets. This press coverage corroborates the second aspect that I focus on: lavish, strategized, and multi-sited receptions of visiting African American activists that emphasized the sentimentality of connection between the PRC and black America. In particular, my analysis makes use of the official notes and itineraries from Robert Williams's month-long cross-country tour in the fall of 1964, paying especial heed to the political rationale behind each activity and conversation, as outlined by Chinese statesmen. Third, I examine the local meetings and performances that popularized both historical and up-to-date information of black struggle in the United States of America, while occasioning declarations of solidarity from the social groups at the forefront of Chinese revolution: women, workers, students. Across town halls and the pages of national newspapers, the messaging stayed consistent. In dramatic fashion, ordinary Chinese people announced that their political empathies with African Americans were grounded in a resonant historical suffering and declared the makeshift bravery of US urban riots an inspiration.
I contend that these ceremonies constituted ‘acts of staging’, as elucidated by historian Rebecca Karl. Karl posits the late imperial period as the moment that birthed a Chinese nationalism grounded in the intimate dialogue and engagement of non-Western entities and actors. In her words, the turn of the twentieth century witnessed a Chinese ‘staging of the world’, especially of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific territories. Karl elaborates:
This was the complex terrain of the world ‘staging’ of identification and proximity that Chinese intellectuals consciously entered and constructed … and it was on this stage that the combining of ideas of race, struggle, revolution and [kingdom] concerns into a synchronic modern globality and uneven global spatiality, and permitted Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and other places to emerge into view … as material sites for the production and performance of new global, national, and local meanings, practices, and histories.Footnote 12
In a literal and figurative sense, ‘staging’ continued to play a prominent role in construing Chinese self-identity during the Cold War. The occurrence of black urban uprisings in the United States of America underscored China's importance as both historical precedent and political inspiration for anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggles the world over. That African Americans have ‘risen up’ against an oppressive state, with their makeshift weapons and barebones spirit, affirmed the actions of China past as well as the ideologies its espoused in the present. This reinvented globality of the early 1960s, which grappled with new sets of geopolitical and world-historical concerns, must be understood in the context of a trend that characterized China during its long twentieth century: the articulation of national identity in relationship to states, territories, and populations beyond East Asia and Europe.
The Chinese responses to black suffering and resistance comprise a significant chapter in the modern tradition of African American experiences acquiring global purchase and potency. Indian anti-colonial activists in the 1920s and Japanese imperialists during the Second World War, for example, had also appealed to the internationalist impulses of black radicalism.Footnote 13 But the moment of the global 1960s—an era marked by interconnected social movements that challenged state power on an international scale, often inspired by Marxist ideals—explains the heightened, mutual appeal of Maoist China and the African American left. Chinese strategic efforts to engage US black activists in the early and mid-1960s point to the political and cultural bridge-building that precipitated the worldwide unrest of the later 1960s. Such overtures, subsequently, figured crucially in the transition from the first to the second wave of developing-worldism. While the former had been defined by strictly racial-nationalist projects, the latter would be more openly motivated by Marxism-Leninism as a theory of liberation.Footnote 14 In this critical moment, Maoist China presented itself as the champion of an anti-imperialist politics that effectively merged racialism and international socialism.
Heroes and villains: news accounts of African American struggle
When Mao issued his first public pronouncement of support for the US black freedom struggle, it was not without context or foreground. Since 1949, the PRC had utilized media and press to advance its own vision and interpretation of African American history and social movements. The frequency and intensity of coverage spiked in the early 1960s.Footnote 15 During this time, national newspapers featured various long-form research exposés on racial stratification in the United States of America, often accompanied by shocking statistics and photographs of deeply entrenched discrimination, struggle, and despair. Couched in historical and political data, these analytical pieces conjured a grim portrait of US social realities—one in which deeply entrenched hierarchies could only be undone with violent insurrection, in accordance with the Chinese way. The thesis remained constant; unfailingly, they narrated a linear tale of black uprising tearing at the seams of a fragile, contradiction-laden US empire. One article from 15 June 1963, for example, launched with an appraisal of the durability and momentousness of mass organizing:
The African American protest movement that began in Birmingham, Alabama two months ago have now spread all across the country. This struggle against discrimination and for equal rights once again revealed the banner of ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’, trumpeted by U.S. constitutional law and the president, to be garbage.Footnote 16
This allegation was followed by a string of unattributed statistics pinpointing the economic and social disparities confronting African Americans: 90 per cent of companies in Pennsylvania refused to blacks, the overall unemployment rate in Oklahoma was 6.5 per cent but 30 per cent for blacks, the life expectancy for blacks was seven years shorter than that for whites. As a result, ‘Today, thousands of African Americans fight imminent hunger and death, on the brink of despair’.Footnote 17
Further, the PRC's articulation of US black freedom struggles comprised two interlocking components: in addition to providing updates and examination of unfolding events within the United States of America, news reports highlighted international and intra-national expressions of solidarity with African American activists. In August of 1964, for example, the People's Daily reported that mass gatherings in ten Chinese cities—including Hohhot, Urumqi, and Lhasa in addition to Shanghai, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Xi'an, Wuhan, and Kunming—had taken place to commemorate the statement's one-year anniversary. These meetings consisted of local party officials, academics, and students speaking out against US revisionism, racial discrimination, and a world system in which racial matters and global economic exploitation were entwined. At the Lhasa convention, a communist politician of Tibetan descent purportedly announced: ‘The Tibetan people have just achieved freedom and happiness after democratic reforms, so they hold boundless empathy for the African American struggle for rights to equality and freedom. We resolutely support the African American struggle.’Footnote 18 It was on this basis of historical parallelism and fraternal empathy that Chinese reports attributed progress in the US civil rights movement to Mao's strategies and inspiration. In other words, the casting of African American revolution as a development inspired by Maoism not only inscribed black freedom struggles into the vision of global Maoism, but also underscored the experiential foundations of this bond of solidarity.
Zachary Scarlett construes the PRC's Cold War overtures to African Americans as part and parcel of its global geopolitical manoeuvring in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split. Scarlett notes that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ‘engaged in an ontological pursuit …. The party attempted to birth a world in which the PRC had supplanted the Soviet Union as the dominant communist state’.Footnote 19 Indeed, the CCP rewrote the traditional script of global socialist order into one where, in place of the Soviet Union, the PRC occupied the central position of authority and righteousness. To this end, the CCP employed the issue of US racial oppression as an instrument to highlight the sharp dichotomy between its own deep, informed desires for African American freedom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)’s behind-the-scenes, callous collusion with the US empire. Unlike the deceptive Soviets, the Chinese stood fully behind African American revolutionaries and endorsed their ‘inevitable’ trajectory from peaceful protest to violent agitation.Footnote 20 This interpretative framework calls into question not only the effects of US and Soviet state actors, but their very motivations and capacities for empathy. As such, the Chinese lent support to black activists that extended far beyond rhetorical declarations: it actively engaged in the staging, theorization, and dissemination of African American struggles.
The interplay of racism and class exploitation comprised a major point of emphasis for the Chinese press. The glue that bound racial hierarchy, as article after article underscored, was US monopoly capitalism. Even as individual acts of racial violence—those perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), for example—also received attention, their acknowledgment was only extended with the qualification that the driving force of singular racist episodes was class stratification in capitalist fashion. As an article celebrating the one-year anniversary of the first proclamation had declared:
The developments of the past year has further evidenced that Mao's analysis and assessment of the African American people's anti-discrimination struggle are completely correct … [African American groups] have realized with increasing clarity that the oppression and discrimination they experience is not the work of a few white supremacists; to achieve equality and freedom rights, they must wage unceasing struggle with an American class system that maintains racial discrimination.Footnote 21
The article proceeded to exclaim that China will always stand on the side of the African American people because, as Mao’s declaration pointed out: ‘The evil systems of colonialism and imperialism only flourished alongside the enslavement and trafficking of blacks, so they will also come to an end with the full emancipation of the black race.’ Reality will be as Mao's declaration pointed out: ‘The evil systems of colonialism and imperialism only flourished alongside the enslavement and trafficking of blacks, so they will also come to an end with the full emancipation of the black race.’Footnote 22 As such, the plight of US black liberation, both its history and its present state of affairs, emerged as a compass of and testimonial to Mao's visions for world revolution.
Newspaper accounts also venerated particular figures of African American activism known to voice their allegiances with Chinese communism. Given their generous appraisals of both Maoist theory and the chairman himself, Robert Williams—former leader of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP and an advocate of armed self-defence—and his wife Mabel commanded a heavy presence in national media, as news articles celebrated the Chinese officials’ warm relationships with these black nationalist guests. During a brief 1963 stay of the Williamses in Beijing, the communist party organized a banquet in their honour—one attended by various international guests and the esteemed communist writer and politician Guo Moruo. At the ceremony, Guo expressed the Chinese people's condemnation of the ‘monstrous attacks’ against African Americans, carried out by racists abetted by the Kennedy presidential Administration.Footnote 23 At Guo's request, every guest stood up and raised their rights fists in mourning for the ‘martyrs’ who had perished in Birmingham.Footnote 24 Shortly thereafter, a crowd of more than 10,000 gathered at the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square to demonstrate their support for the African American freedom; Williams delivered a searing sermon to the audience that concluded with a vow to carry out the battle for freedom until death. Foreign representatives from countries as wide-ranging as Japan and Namibia then spoke out against US racism and expressed their belief that the African American struggle is of global-historical significance.Footnote 25 The photographs and news stories from such encounters informed the micro-level constitution of developing-world solidarity, as the Chinese media doled out for its public a story of China's profound empathy and support for the justifiably violent African American struggle.
The PRC's tactical engagements with black visitors from the United States of America capitalized on the most sensational aspects of African American experiences: their persecution by the ‘fascist’ state, their resilience and bravery in direct confrontations with the police forces, and their exemplary cultural and intellectual advancements in spite of repression. In November of 1963, for instance, Williams held a massive press conference in Beijing, attended by over 80 Chinese and foreign journalists.Footnote 26 Williams praised the determination with which the fight for black liberation would carry on even in the face of tear gas, bullets, and police batons. In a symbolic gesture, he pulled out the warrant for his arrest and, with his finger on the image, announced to the audience: ‘This is the best evidence of “democracy” and “freedom” in the United States.’Footnote 27 As the news article explained, the US government has already printed 250,000 copies of this warrant, plastered all around the country, instructing anyone who sees Williams to shoot him.Footnote 28 The violence of the American state—to which Williams could attest to with his body, his physical presence—figured prominently in the Chinese narrative of African American suffering.
Chen Jian argues that China's revolutionary foreign policy during the Cold War ‘must be understood in context of the Chinese people's “victim mentality” and its connections to the age-old Central Kingdom concept’.Footnote 29 In short, two intimately entwined seemingly contradictory tropes—China's suffering at the hands of Western imperialism and its positioning at the focal point of the universe—propelled Chinese diplomacy from the late 1940s until 1972. The interpretative and narrative framework used to recount the African American struggle encapsulated Chen's observation: China, drawing on its own colonial past, placed itself at the forefront of a campaign for justice around which the remainder of the developing world would congregate. On 31 August, 1963, the People's Daily ran ‘A Wave of Support for the African American Struggle Spreads Around the World’, which featured statements of solidarity from various Xinhua news branches in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. According to the report, a Cuban university student union announced that it
enthusiastically expresses support for acts of dignity by U.S. citizens, and extends brotherly condolences to the African Americans struggling against anti-black discrimination … the March on Washington has garnered the attention of people from different countries around the world, they are uniting together, mobilizing to oppose the evil inherent to capitalism—racial discrimination.Footnote 30
A leader in the Swaziland People's Liberation Assembly purportedly told Xinhua: ‘I represent our party to express deep sympathy for African American protestors who are persecuted by the Kennedy government …. The truth is, Kennedy not only supports the oppression of blacks in his country, he supports the oppression of Africans.’Footnote 31 These citations of global revolutionary groups in their condemnations of racism, from places as far apart as Japan and the Comoros Island, depicted an international consensus on the historical and political indictment acutely laid out by China.
Like the Cuban students, many of the those quoted in the article inferred the March on Washington as a landmark event; the Venezuela National Liberation Front deemed it the beginning of another phase in the civil rights struggle, while an Indonesian newspaper claimed that the march ‘debunked’ the myths of US imperialism, such as democracy and basic rights.Footnote 32 The unmistakable knell of progress in these homages to US civil rights, doled out without any qualification about the challenges and difficulties inherent in this movement-making, boiled down the black protesters to its own sort of caricature: singularly driven, hard-charging rebels who finally realized and latched onto the tenets of Maoism. The Chinese press celebrated black activists not for remaking Western, or Chinese, theories in their own right, but rather for their apparent decision to lift and adapt them verbatim. Taken together, these narratives of the contemporary African American experiences provided an effective foil to the visual propaganda also commonplace during this timeframe.
Robeson Taj Frazier has already underscored the ahistorical and culturally essentialist tendencies of Cultural Revolution-era depicting black characters engaged in militaristic, anti-imperialist struggle. As he notes, the sensational visual propaganda of developing-world solidarity often glorified black agitators wielding ‘pitchforks and other farming tools’, strategically ‘freezing black Americans in time’.Footnote 33 Curiously, however, this reductive identification of African Americans complemented, and took root in, an original analysis of historical context and modern-day political confluences. The constant stream of news pieces pieced together a steady plotline of increasingly violent black revolution on US soil—one that occasioned both international and intra-national declarations of solidarity. In this uncomplicated picture of evident heroes and evident villains, the marginal groups critical to the Chinese vision of global solidarity against racism and imperialism—such as ethnic Tibetans at home and the Vietnamese abroad—could easily see and declare their allegiances. The PRC's media machine then adorned those proclamations with great fanfare, pushing forth and cementing the historical and political context that rendered this sort of transnational, cross-racial solidarity-making a duty and a necessity. In other words, it was in the standardization and romanticization of African American agency and resistance that the Chinese press wrested away from black activists themselves the powers to construe their own multidimensional, deeply complex stories.
Engineering sentimentality: local receptions of black activists
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a succession of African American leaders—some while in exile from the United States of America—travelled to Beijing.Footnote 34 They consorted with Chinese leaders, toured model factories and communes, and broadcast their experiences to their home communities. For the PRC, its invitations and subsequent receptions of African American activists commanded immense symbolic currency within the domestic news and political circuits. Furthermore, its targeted efforts to ‘politically educate’ its guests, employing props and actors such as children and music, underscore the importance of sentimentality to this particular project of cementing transnational, cross-racial solidarity.
In this section, I break down the nuances of a one-month-long visit to China undertaken by Robert Williams and his family in the autumn of 1964.Footnote 35 Chinese officials meticulously arranged the sights, meetings, and activities for them down to the minute details. It was Williams's second time setting foot in China. In the first, during October of 1963, a special central committee charged with receiving him had gathered to discuss the political underpinnings of the task. To wide approval, the delegate from Beijing summarized:
[The guest] doesn't understand us, and while abroad, has also heard a variety of false Western claims about us …. Our conclusion is that we must help him on two fronts. We must emphasize that race struggle is class struggle and that racial nationalism cannot counter racial nationalism. In addition, it is through our receiving of him that he can attain a ‘correct understanding’ of us.Footnote 36
The agenda for the 1964 visit, carefully laid out in a lengthy report that circulated between major municipalities, underscores the intentionality behind the fanfare that awaited Williams—as well as the sense of political righteousness that grounded the PRC's attempts to ‘educate’ him. The document explicitly named the Chinese national interests best served by Williams's much-publicized visit as follows: ‘It will take us a step further in proving that we staunchly oppose U.S. imperialism, support racial liberation movements, support the goals of the U.S. black struggle … [We will also] raise Williams’ ideological consciousness, solidify and expand his influence and impact in the black struggle.’Footnote 37 In other words, the local receptions of Williams and his family in cities and villages across China had not been spontaneous so much as completely orchestrated. The grand purpose of aiding African Americans in their ultimate victory compelled the PRC to engineer the sentimentality of solidarity.
Historian Vijay Prashad concludes that ‘The Third World was not a place, but a project’.Footnote 38 It comprised a loose collection of shared ideals and historical experiences, necessarily anchored by institutions, common symbols, and larger-than-life leaders. Prashad's keen observations into the labours and trials of solidarity-making shed light on the intentionality behind the PRC's well-considered attempts to engage Robert Williams. Similar to the conception of the ‘Third World’, the sentiments of political affinity between African American radicalism and communist China were a strategic enterprise. Chinese diplomats kept close tabs on Williams's political evolution with regard to his opinions on concepts such as racial nationalism, socialist internationalism, and Soviet revisionism. The 24 September edition of the Waibin qingkuang huibao (the Report on the Situation of Foreign Visitors), for example, alleged positive developments as to Williams's ideological stances, as Williams asserted in private conversation that (1) the USSR stood aligned with the US government and (2) he preferred to see the presidential election of Barry Goldwater, who would show the ‘real face’ of the United States of America. The progression of Williams's political beliefs functioned as a yardstick for the PRC's project of forging solidarity with African American radicals—one which assumed that the political trajectory of the latter would emulate that of the former.
The cartography of Cold War politics—especially the strife and manoeuvring between the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba—set the precarious backdrop for Williams's visit. Both at the prompting of Chinese officials and of his own accord, Williams laid out the nuances of his relationship with Fidel Castro and with Cuba. He revealed that, most recently, Castro had actually written to him to request information about this visit to China. In response, to the surprise of Cuban officials, Williams denounced the USSR's false sympathies for the plight of African Americans and praised Chinese communism.Footnote 39 Ultimately, he concluded, though Cuba supported him in his personal endeavours, its ‘internal revisionism’ prevented any full endorsement of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM)—the underground, Marxist-Leninist, black nationalist organization that had elected him president.Footnote 40 Castro, it turned out, simply ignored Williams's request for $24,000 each year to fund the guerrilla activities of the RAM.
The PRC enthusiastically complied with Williams's request to tour areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, eager to highlight parallelism between their striving in pre-revolutionary China and that of present-day African Americans. Williams proved to be a receptive audience. In Hohhot, he marvelled at the rapid economic and social progress that the PRC had brought to the Inner Mongolians since 1949. He explicitly drew the parallel that ‘the oppression, exploitation, discrimination and other such circumstances experienced by the inner Mongolians before liberation are just like the suffering of African Americans today’.Footnote 41 As his entourage toured the old city, lined with street vendors hawking vegetables and fruit, Williams called out the ‘lies’ the US government had spun that, under communism, the Chinese people constantly faced famine and starvation. Time and again, ordinary citizens—‘nomads, students, and workers’—approached him to declare their solidarity with the plight of African Americans. The capstone moment came during a music-and-dance production held specifically for the occasion of Williams's visit, when a male soprano performed two songs dedicated to the US black struggle: ‘We Shall Overcome’, the African American protest song, and another touching piece by a Chinese composer, entitled ‘We Support You, American Black Brothers!’ Mesmerized, Williams exclaimed to the Chinese officials accompanying him that he could not believe he was audience to the anthem of the black freedom struggle in Inner Mongolia. He requested a recording that he could play in the United States of America.
Through humour and light-hearted conviviality, the Chinese statesmen assigned to accompany Williams strove to cultivate his political loyalties. The transnational camaraderie between the two camps was reinforced with facetious reminders that they shared a common political foe. Given the pretext of the Bay of Pigs Incident, Williams joked to Chinese officials that he wanted to ask the Cubans: ‘Where is your Khrushchev now?’ A few days later, when Khrushchev's resignation came up in discussion, Williams remarked that perhaps he had stepped down not due to ‘health reasons’, as the Soviet media claimed, but rather ill ‘political health’.Footnote 42 In this vein, irony also figured prominently in the framing a deceptive, manipulative United States of America. Upon seeing the Tibetan Tripitaka at the National Minorities Institute in Beijing, Williams asked to be photographed with the collection, explaining that the US government had long relied on the myth of communist godlessness to dissuade blacks from the political ideology. To press his point to ethnic Tibetan students at the institute, he exclaimed: ‘The Yankees say you all are suffering under the communist party's violent authoritarian rule, awaiting their rescue!’Footnote 43
In Shanghai, the final station on his journey, Williams visited the Cultural Palace, which displayed various memorabilia of Mao's 1963 proclamation as well as a translated copy of his own memoir, Negroes with Guns. Here, he proceeded to chat with some retired workers. They contrasted social provisions for the elderly in the United States of America and in China, and iterated their resolute support for the African American struggle. Another group of workers performed their rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome’ as well as two other songs, entitled ‘We Want Cuba, Not the Yankees’ and ‘The World Proletariat Unite’. Deeply moved, Williams shook hands with each of the Chinese workers, expressing his firm conviction that they stood as one.Footnote 44 At Huangpu Park by the Bund, Williams watched as kids played by a tattered sign still preserved from colonial Shanghai—one proclaiming ‘No Dogs and Chinese Allowed’.Footnote 45 Upon sight of him, the children encircled him and sang ‘The East Is Red’. A throng of students at the Children's Palace had presented him with the trademark red scarf of Chinese youth. A sombre Williams ruminated that black kids in the United States of America could never enjoy such a carefree environment—that, if they attempted to enter any ‘Children's Palace’, they would have been jailed or bitten by police dogs. ‘But one day,’ he predicted, ‘our children can be like Chinese children and achieve liberation.’Footnote 46
Throughout the month-long cross-country trek, Chinese officials employed various devices of symbolism and sentimentality—music, children, art, public performance, and enshrined reminders of the Chinese colonial past—to reinforce Williams's affinities for socialist China. In the span of one visit, representatives from various geographic, ethnic, and revolutionary corners of Chinese society verbalized their commitment to supporting US black freedom struggles. They did so in factories, schools, and the Inner Mongolian steppes. The post-racial posturing of the Chinese state was crystallized in these interactions between host and guest, as the PRC answered Williams's request to visit areas where ethnic minorities reside with resounding public demonstrations of multi-ethnic harmony.Footnote 47
The PRC's carefully orchestrated fanfare surrounding Williams's visit functioned as an indispensable Cold War strategy. The sentimental foundations of political solidarity were laid in Robert Williams's warm, lavish reception across the cities of post-revolution China. In a particularly demonstrative episode, Williams was greeted by an enthusiastic group of children upon his arrival in Yan'ji, a city in northern Jilin province, all of them ethnically Korean. Immediately, Williams called out a stark difference between the colloquial receptions of blacks in China and in his home country.Footnote 48 ‘In the U.S., when children see a black person,’ he had exclaimed with surprise, ‘they scream “nigger”.’Footnote 49 The extent to which ordinary Chinese people, without the intervention of the state, actually held blacks in such high regard is more dubious.Footnote 50 It is evident, nonetheless, that the streetside overtures from everyday Chinese people captured the heart and political imagination of Williams and his entire family. Even Williams's elder son, Robert Jr, just 15 years old, expressed awe and fraternity with Chinese citizens upon touring the No. 15 Middle School in Beijing. He announced to the enthusiasm of accompanying Chinese officials that ‘the cause of the Chinese people is [our] cause, the revolution being carried out by the Chinese people is the one that must be carried out by all the world's oppressed peoples’.Footnote 51
This clarion call to solidarity, from the lips of a teenager, encapsulated the form and spirit of solidarity-making at the heart of the visit: the gracious hosts invite the guests to an impressive demonstration of social progress and racial consciousness, which leads the latter to vocalize their absolute faith in the Chinese way. Every stop on the journey rendered explicit the contrast between the United States of America, defined by deceit and hierarchy, and the PRC, marked by its commitment to supporting the underdog struggling against the yokes of racism and imperialism. After all, as the sign at Huangpu Park evinced, the Chinese people—ethnic minorities alongside the majority—had only just successfully beaten back the same chains that now held down African Americans.
Narrating international history, forging solidarity: the case of Shanghai
Beyond consistent press coverage and elaborate receptions of select black guests, another pillar upheld and defined this moment of Chinese solidarity with African American liberation: public meetings and rallies in which local citizens of different revolutionary stripes and backgrounds—especially women, students, factory workers, and ethnic minorities—declared their empathies with black activists in the United States of America. These vocal, public enunciations of solidarity served a two-fold purpose: they cemented intra-national cohesion while also affirming international affinities. In this section, I explicate the archives and proceedings of a particular set of gatherings in Shanghai to highlight the intentional schooling of Chinese citizens on African American politics and history. That factory workers and university students, many of them women, stood up to voice unity with their black ‘brothers and sisters’ underscores the grassroots makings of this particular strain of solidarity. In the first caucus that I examine, the identity of each speaker carried no less significance than the content of his or her words; an even balance between high-status party leaders and common labourers suggested the organic, united-front nature of solidarity. The sweeping vision of an anti-racist, anti-capitalist struggle on a global scale, as articulated by the delegates, extends from the contention at the heart of the congregation: the political compass of a true Chinese revolutionary extended far beyond national socialist progress.
On 8 August 1964, four organizations—the Shanghai General Labor Union, the Shanghai Women’s Federation, the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Communist Youth Group, and the Shanghai branch of the Council of Chinese Citizens to Protect World Peace—hosted a meeting in which representatives from each group delivered eloquent speeches in praise of African American political movements. The event, held on the one-year anniversary of Mao's 1963 statement, featured the dozen delegates attesting, in succession, to the highest regards with which they viewed US black revolution. Drawing on their identity as a liberated people who only recently escaped the clutches of imperialism, they framed their unconditional support for African American freedom as historical responsibility. In the introductory notes, Comrade Zhang Qi elaborated upon the historical and political context of the gathering:
The black American struggle against racial discrimination has persisted for a century …. After World War II, the strength of the black proletariat has increased. Ethnic liberation and socialist struggles proliferate around the world …. Since educational desegregation in Little Rock in 1957, the scale of the struggle has steadily expanded …. This attests to American communist revolutionary leader Foster's observation that ‘Within the ranks of American workers, blacks possess the greatest potential for struggle’ …. Because this struggle occurs in the heart of the primary fortress of world reactionaries, its meaning is critically important …. We Chinese people are even more deeply concerned with the black American struggle, and see supporting their struggle as our high internationalist duty.Footnote 52
In casting William Foster as an important leader of a new revolution, Zhang rewrote the script of African American history and resistance as understood from within the United States of America and in most other international contexts.Footnote 53
In his concluding remarks, he extended another pointed analogy that compared the suffering of African Americans to that of the pre-1949 Chinese. By extension, the road to liberation that China undertook would be the exact prescription for black activists in the United States of America:
We, the labouring people of Shanghai, experienced long-term oppression and bondage at the hands of imperialism; foreign imperialists considered us ‘yellow-skinned slaves’, throwing at us unwarranted indignities and humiliations. At a very deep level, we understand the truth that Chairman Mao has pointed to: ‘racial struggle is fundamentally a matter of class struggle.’ The foreign imperialists call themselves the ‘superior race’ and call us Chinese the ‘inferior race’, which merely allows them to act like a vampire, riding on the heads of the Chinese labouring masses …. As we live like cattle, the Chinese officials and landlords, who belong to the same race as us, form a coalition [with the imperialists], also riding on our heads. This issue is clear. This isn't a problem between the races, but between the classes …. The American blacks’ anti-discrimination struggle, like our struggle against imperialist aggression, is a grave scene of class struggle.Footnote 54
A worker from the No. 2 Textile Factory echoed Zhang's emphasis on racial strife as a matter of class struggle, asserting that Mao's analysis was a case of ‘one needle meets blood’, before elaborating: ‘The American monopoly capitalist class depends on racially discriminatory policies to stir up the hatred of white workers for blacks, resulting in white workers’ prejudice towards black workers, breaking apart and destroying the unity of the labouring masses.’ Speeches throughout the event struck this fraternal note of solidarity. Anchored by declarations of empathy, they reiterated the class-based origins of the US race question.
This brand of racialized capitalism demanded radical solutions. Tang noted that, in the 100 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, ‘black consciousness’ has continued to rise in spite of ‘repression [and] deception’. He condemned Khrushchev for calling for African Americans to be patient, for categorizing them as ‘racial separatists’. The US government, Tang exclaimed, already
does not treat blacks as human beings …. Most blacks have been deprived of their voting rights. In many states, they cannot study at the same schools as whites, eat at the same table, nor can they take the same public buses or trains to travel. They are frequently … beaten and killed. In face of such cruel government representatives, how can one expect them to follow through on promises of ‘peaceful society and productive labour’? With the U.S. government carrying out such brutal armed repression of our black brothers, how can one ask them to ‘be patient’, to realize what ‘peaceful transition’? Is this not a pipe dream, obviously asking them to be forever enslaved and oppressed?
Here, Tang reiterated Mao's consistent line of attack that Soviet revisionists—given their self-proclaimed values of non-violence and peace—actually undermined the full promise of black revolution within the United States of America, and ultimately functioned as an equal enabler of US imperialist aggressions.
Other speakers from the ranks of labourers and students testified to the enormous inspirational value they perceived in the African American struggle, as well as the enthusiasm with which they had closely followed everyday news accounts of the unfolding story. The opening lines of Liu Kunlin's speech captured this them; Liu announced:
I am a worker at the Shanghai Turbine Factory and a member of the [factory's] militia. All of our militia, the brothers and sisters at the factory, resolutely support the African American struggle …. From the newspapers we read reports that their struggle has vigorously progressed …. We all say: ‘Our black brothers in America did it right …. We must learn from the [their] fearlessness of force, courageous and resilient fighting spirit, to make greater contributions to building our homeland, protecting our homeland, and supporting the international communist revolutionary struggle.’Footnote 55
These moments and instances of political cross-pollination and cross-identification, announced in public spaces and performances, composed the general sentiments of transnational solidarity between Chinese citizens, in the midst of ‘perpetual revolution’, and their global counterparts, with African Americans as indispensable players in the worldwide struggle. Explicit identifiers—worker, militiamen, migrants—further accentuate a revolutionary, brother-to-brother sort of bond holding together two oppressed or formerly oppressed groups of proximate historical experiences. The label of the ‘internationalist socialist’—the ordinary Chinese labourer or farmer who allied himself with anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles worldwide—is aided in its realization by such public affirmations of solidarity.
In his speech, Liu highlighted the importance of regular newspaper accounts to his awareness of US events. Informational mass meetings had also facilitated the public diffusion of knowledge on African American history. From 1963 to 1965, for instance, Liu Liangmo—a musician and politician who served in various high-level capacities including vice chair of the National Youth League and vice chair of the China Christian Three-Patriotisms Movement Committee—delivered a ‘World Events Report Meetings’ lecture series at the Shanghai Youth Palace on the subject of the African American anti-discrimination struggle. More than 500 schoolteachers, students, and intellectuals turned out to three of four sessions, with the other attracting 300. In the first, held on 14 September 1963, Liu launched with an annotated summary of Mao's August proclamation.Footnote 56 For this congregation, he placed emphasis not merely on updates of the unfolding struggle, but, more importantly, on advancing a framework for their interpretation—one that began with Mao and ended with the inevitable victory of the black working class. As Liu reiterated, global capitalism could not disintegrate unless hyper-exploited African Americans achieved their freedom. In the political narrative that he laid out for his audience, black liberation in the United States of America amounted to an imperative for the Chinese vision of global socialism to take form.Footnote 57 This particular take on the global contexts and meanings of US civil rights movements bespeaks the paradoxical stance that the PRC adopted with regard to African American struggle. Black resistance in the United States of America marked a just expression of anti-racist and nationalist aspirations, yet the very nature of black oppression represented an extension of the true underlying problem: monopoly capitalism. This imbrication of race and class discourses constituted a peculiar conundrum. The PRC proclaimed its support for African American nationalist leaders such as Robert Williams, condemned the travesties of US social and political racism, and centred its own past encounters with Western race hierarchy into appeals to black diasporic activists. African American liberation, however, would never figure as an end in and of itself; rather, it could only be a stepping stone in the chain of actions and reactions leading to the dissolution of world capitalism.
Liu's impressive factual knowledge of US racial injustices served to bolster a specific vision of imminent African American revolt. Liu relayed the daily injustices and indignities visited upon African Americans by both the government and organized white supremacists, such as oral exams to inhibit voting (allegedly, with impossible questions such as ‘How many windows are in the White House?’ and ‘How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?’), segregated public transportation and facilities, and murders and arsons committed by the KKK. The rationale for the KKK's crimes, Liu explained, was the threat posed by a black electorate primed to elect black politicians and representatives. Harkening back to the major plot points of the Chinese revolution, he reminded the audience of the critical parallel: just as the Chinese people had taken up arms in defence of their nation, African Americans stood on the verge of their own righteous and violent revolution.Footnote 58 Once again, this PRC official's narrative of African American revolution arrayed recurring themes: the preposterous political repression of the US government, the casual use of terror on the part of white supremacists, and the historical inevitability of successful uprising.
Liu also delivered keynotes on African American movements on 24 May 1963 and on 24 September 1965. In the latter, a speech entitled ‘The New Storm of Black American Revolution’, he elaborated upon the Watts Rebellion:
This August, the American city of Los Angeles exploded in powerful black struggle. The scale of this struggle has been rarely observed in history, lasting more than one week … [It involved] taking up arms to fight against the U.S. ruling authorities. Over the course of several days, hundreds of police officers were injured, such that even the reactionary U.S. police admitted: ‘We lost control of the black districts.’ American blacks want to fight for black freedom, not lose their lives for American imperialism in Vietnam. During those days, men and women old and young crowded onto the streets. They took up any makeshift weapons like sticks, stones, and homemade bombs.Footnote 59
Here, Liu painted an inspirational image of grassroots uprising that was deeply informed, politically grounded, and rife with revolutionary potential. These particular descriptions of the turmoil in Watts, which mirrored newspaper accounts of imminent black revolution, pointed to a storyline in which ordinary citizens, with their make-do arsenal, have begun to pose to fundamental threat to the US political order.
Racial turmoil in the United States of America seemed to attest to the truth of the PRC's peculiar analyses of race as an artifice of capitalism. Chinese news accounts and public performances advanced a unique line of reasoning that acknowledged the violent, brutal realities of racism while advocating a black-led class struggle as the solution. In Liu's interpretation of ‘black nationalism’ (heiren minzu zhuyi), for example, alliance with the white working class amounted to an absolute necessity; black consciousness and self-determination marked only the recognition of racial oppression as a facet of class stratification. In this vein, black empowerment functioned as means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
Public gatherings at the local scale also cemented the global vision and revolutionary credentials of the civilian groups foundational to Chinese national identity in the early 1960s: workers, students, and women. The US civil rights movement provided the canvas upon which Chinese citizens could announce and perform their affinities with a political struggle emblematic of anti-imperialist socialism and resonant with China's own histories. In singing the praises of violent rebellion in US cities, everyday Chinese people engaged in the construction of a developing-world retelling of events—one in which the populations most marginalized by racial capitalism stood on the precipice of a decisive victory. Aligned with the state-sponsored take on the problem of race, their approach managed to suggest both fraternalism and paternalism. They recognized African Americans as their brothers in struggle but, at the same time, believed that the black contemporary plight in the United States of America echoed their own nearly half a century ago. The alleged African American turn to armed resistance was admired for its grit and bravery rather than any political strategies or ideology; the latter remained the realm and invention of revolutionary China.
Conclusion: symbolism and reductionism in children's stories
During this era, story collections for Chinese children also began to feature grim and devastating tales of American anti-black racism: of homelessness, hunger, despair, and torture at the hands of the KKK. Grim plotlines included that of Jack, an 11-year-old black boy in Chicago whose mother died in an accident at the toothpaste factory where she worked. The orphaned Jack sought aid from the factory owner, who offered meagre wages in exchanging for hawking the streets while wearing an advertising placard, from dawn to midnight. Soon, a group of well-dressed white men, proclaiming themselves the KKK, encircled Jack; they taunted and severely beat him until he lost the white teeth that had gained him employment in the first place. The factory owner dismissed him and Jack was left to wander the avenues as a child beggar. Most tellingly, this story was entitled ‘I am a Black Child, I Live in America’.Footnote 60 The use of African American identity as a symbol and stand-in for extreme suffering under capitalism deployed race as an analytical category, but collapsed the multiplicity of US black experiences into a singular story of anguish. Moreover, the fact that, ultimately, the injured Jack was rescued off the streets by sympathetic white workers further reduced the agency of black American themselves to determine and pursue recourse for racial discrimination; the remedy lay in class-based solidarity that erased divisions by race.
In another tale from the same anthology, ‘A Happy Home’, a black street orphan named Jim was recruited to act—for no compensation—in a documentary intended to airbrush the cruelties of slavery.Footnote 61 Jim's father, a poor worker, was jailed two years earlier for the false crime of ‘disrespecting a white man’. In the film, Jim has a kindly white mistress who shares with him finger sandwiches but, on the set, he was badly mistreated by the white directors and in real life was taunted by white schoolchildren. Most paradoxically, the aim of the entire production was to broadcast to post-colonial Africa the supposed history of US respect for and fair treatment of its black citizens. When a black stuntman was horrifically injured after falling from a frame, he was revealed to be Jim's father, recently released onto the streets without a penny to his name. Though father and son finally reunited in this cruel coincidence, they were both fired from the production and found themselves unemployed and homeless.
The parallel in these eerie, gloomy conclusions met by Jack and Jim illuminates the themes present in Chinese depictions of American black experiences: an undifferentiated linearity of suffering and despair, a penetrating context of global capitalism, and the paradox of black oppression in a nation that prides itself on ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. In conjunction with these children's stories, three instruments of solidarity—newspaper accounts, strategic receptions for handpicked black visitors, and public declarations—would prove foundational to constructing this two-way but disconnected, tenuous exchange between African American activists and China in the early 1960s.
Ultimately, the PRC's innovative yet reductive readings of US black nationalism and civil rights struggles points to their outsized and often neglected global impact, not merely as events that occurred, but as symbols and stories perceived. Chinese reporters, officials, and local citizens infused African American protests with their own set of meanings that, in turn, affirmed national histories and political choices. It is crucial that, in the PRC's constructions of the US racial state, its foreign brothers and sisters found themselves entrapped in circumstances reminiscent of late imperial and Republican China. Precisely as China once did, African Americans confront the twin foes of racial oppression and capitalist exploitation, the former a device of humiliation and stratification designed to uphold the latter. As China's news exposés and everyday people spoke to the greatest atrocities of American white supremacy—attacking with righteous rage the intimate bonds between US capital, racism, and imperial ambitions—it becomes apparent that African American freedom struggles have emerged as a sort of global currency, the support of which is indicative of individual nation states’ commitments to revolutionary values.
