This book considers a scarcely studied aspect of Chinese foreign policy between 1949 and 1976: the “political and cultural traffic” between African American radicals who visited and settled at different times in China, and the Chinese government's evolving policy of using them to pursue two political goals: first, undermining the US's public stance on human rights during the Korean and Vietnam wars by publicizing and supporting African American revolutionary movements; secondly, pursuing an increasingly antagonistic policy towards the Soviet Union, especially in relation to Africa and the developing world at large. This culminated in an opening to the West and Nixon's visit to China. The interesting coda of the book shows how in the 1970s the activists involved in this story, who had been persecuted at home during the McCarthy years, ended up as instruments of the new American policy, against their own instinct.

The book is in two parts, focusing respectively on the 1950s and the 1960s, each prefaced by a historical introduction to Chinese politics and diplomacy for that period, followed by two monographs on the travels in China of specific individuals: W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois, and the journalist William Worthy in part one; the militants, journalists and publishers Mabel and Robert Williams, and the black feminist militant Vicki Garvin in part two. These chapters are based on memoirs and archives from the estates of these writers, on a detailed study of the radical press of the period, as well as on Chinese archives. Of special interest is the analysis of the iconography of Chinese and American revolutionary pamphlets and posters aimed both at local and foreign audiences, depicting the African American and anticolonial struggles, and their relationship to Chinese policy.

W.E.B. Du Bois was the most senior of the African American activists and his visit, with Shirley Graham Du Bois, was that of a foreign dignitary. Du Bois seems to have got along well with Mao and kept a signed volume of his poetry until his death. Their resulting publications about the visit were predictably a celebration of the Chinese people's extraordinary ability to invent a new society and to generate economic development. Throughout his book, Robeson Taj Frazier carefully inscribes the motivations of these travellers within the context of the period and of their own history, which explains what they were willing to believe or to write, sometimes in simplification of what they knew or sensed of reality's complexities (including the poor treatment of African students in China). The Du Boises' papers were aimed at a “coloured” audience in the US and at new African elites. Thus Du Bois noted in a lecture at Peking University, “China is colored and knows to what a colored skin in this modern world subjects its owner” (quoted p. 47). To him the future of Africa was in China and he advised African leaders to “look East” rather than to the former colonizers. Frazier signals here the beginning of an increasingly uneasy aspect of the relationship: both Chinese revolutionary leaders and African American ones portrayed it as that of a benevolent tutelage.

The second section of this part is the most interesting. After the Korean War, several US soldiers opted to stay in China, where they started a new life, but after a while most decided to go home. William Worthy interviewed them throughout the US and collected their memories of POW camps and of their life in China. We get here a good discussion of the importance and purpose of the use of the American racial question in the camps' compulsory doctrinal lectures. Most of the returnees refused the narrative of Chinese brainwashing techniques that had turned into a national obsession in the US (there is here an interesting presentation of this forgotten hysteria). Worthy then managed to travel to China against the administration's prohibition, and interviewed those who had remained, including those who were married and settled as well as some US prisoners (Shui-Bo Wang's 2005 movie They Chose China shows interesting archive footage of this story). His dispatches gave a more complex image of Chinese reality than the Du Boises' accounts. The theme of racial kinship (between “yellow” and “black”) appears again, but so does the question of local minorities and dissidents. Worthy noted his feeling that the answers he got were often mimicry of the official line. This trip to China (which led to the cancellation of his passport), his writings and another illegal trip to Cuba landed Worthy in serious trouble. But this made him an icon of the civil rights movement at home and reinforced the positive image of China among African American militants.

In the second part of the book, the growing antagonism between China and the USSR explains in good part the move of a number of civil rights activists away from the US Communist Party and closer to China. The individual trajectories described first here are those of Robert and Mabel Williams. Both were activists and journalists who evaded arrest on false charges by escaping to Cuba via Canada in 1961. There they continued to publish their radical newsletter, The Crusader, and hosted a Cuban radio programme aimed at the African American population at home, but they grew disillusioned with Cuba's racial reality and the USSR's policy towards the developing world. This section details the growing autonomy of China's foreign policy and Mao's adoption of a third-world leadership agenda. Increasingly isolated and criticized in Cuba for their pro-Chinese articles, they moved to China, where they published articles and wrote in illustrated pamphlets against the Vietnam War aimed at African American soldiers. They became local celebrities in China. Frazier analyses their publications in relationship to Chinese propaganda art and shows their influence on the evolution of militant discourses at home.

The final character in this story is Vicky Garvin, a militant who quit the US Communist Party in 1958, worked for some time in Nigeria, and then lived in Nkrumah's Ghana to witness the construction of a decolonized nation. In 1964, disillusioned with the lack of revolutionary transformations and the neo-colonialism she had observed in both countries, Garvin accepted a Chinese diplomat's invitation to teach English in Shanghai. She taught language through classes on the history of African American liberation movements, drawing on Maoist theory. She also encouraged her female students to promote feminist causes. Like Mabel and Robert Williams, she initially embraced the Cultural Revolution, which celebrated black American militancy. The Red Guards organized her marriage ceremony with the veteran American activist Leibel Bergman – stressing that at that time their interracial marriage would have been illegal in several US states. In the 1970s, she organized tours for foreign militants. However, at the end of the period, like most African American militants, she became disillusioned with China's rapprochement with the US and its shift to realpolitik, which included supporting countries such as South Africa.

These are interesting journeys, both from the point of view of the history of African American radicalism and that of Chinese foreign policy's use of “soft power.” The recurrent insistence on gender bias in militant discourse and iconography is perhaps over-laboured (it is quite obvious and well-known). But this work is grounded on solid scholarship and direct access to archives, and it links lives, anecdotes, archives (textual, visual) and historical context in a meaningful way. It will certainly become a reference in this domain.