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Building a Black Bridge China’S Interaction with African-American Activists During the Cold War

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Building a Black Bridge China’S Interaction with African-American Activists During the Cold War Building a Black Bridge China’s Interaction with African-American Activists during the Cold War ✣ Hongshan Li On 24 December 1956, William Worthy, a special correspondent for The Baltimore Afro-American, walked across the Luohu Bridge from Hong Kong. As he set his feet down in Shenzhen, a small town in Guangdong Province, he became the first U.S. journalist to enter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under an official invitation from the Communist regime. Following Worthy’s example, many African-American activists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Robert F. Williams, Mabel Williams, Vicki Garvin, Huey Newton, and Elaine Brown, traveled to and even stayed for ex- tended periods in the PRC over the next decade-and-a-half. As special guests carefully chosen by Beijing, they toured both the cities and the countryside, delivered speeches at mass rallies, and had their writings published in Chi- nese. Once back in the United States, they appeared on television and radio shows, gave public talks, and published articles in journals and newspapers, sharing their experiences in and thoughts about the PRC. With all traditional diplomatic, commercial, and cultural ties between the two countries termi- nated, the visits of these African-American activists not only allowed Beijing to maintain a controlled flow of people and information across the Pacific, but also provided it with a new instrument to engage and challenge Washington on the cultural front in the Cold War. This close interaction between the PRC and a large number of African-American activists was unprecedented in the long history of Sino-American cultural exchange. Owing to initiatives taken by private citizens and non-governmental or- ganizations, China and the United States had built strong ties through broad, deep, and lasting cultural and educational interactions prior to the found- ing of the PRC in 1949.1 Tens of thousands of Chinese students came to 1. For more discussion on Sino-American cultural relations prior to 1950, see Hongshan Li, China and United States Educational Exchange: State, Society, and Intercultural Relations, 1905–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer 2018, pp. 114–152, doi:10.1162/jcws_a_00814 © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 114 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00814 by guest on 30 September 2021 China’s Interaction with African-American Activists during the Cold War the United States for education, and even more U.S. missionaries, educators, scholars, physicians, journalists, and artists went to China, establishing and operating numerous churches, hospitals, schools, colleges, and philanthropic institutions there. However, very few African Americans, for historical rea- sons, participated in the cultural and educational exchange between the two countries. Although W. E. B. Du Bois, the best-known African-American scholar in the twentieth century, went to China in 1936, his visit was brief and inconspicuous. More importantly, he, like most white U.S. visitors, left China with a rather negative impression of its government and people.2 All this changed when Du Bois returned to China in the 1950s and the 1960s with a large number of African-American activists. Received by the PRC gov- ernment as distinguished guests, the black activists became leading figures in the Cold War cultural interactions between the two countries. Through their visits Beijing built a new bridge that was unlike the one formed between the two countries in the previous century and different from the exchange pro- grams established between the United States and other Communist countries, including the Soviet Union, during the Cold War years.3 The African-American activists’ visits to the PRC at the height of the Cold War have received increasing attention from scholars in the past two decades. However, the focus has been mostly on biographical studies of these activists and on deciphering the pivotal role they played in internationaliz- ing and radicalizing the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.4 The existing scholarship has shed new light on the storied lives of the African- American activists and the multifaceted nature of the civil-rights struggle, but 2. Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 71. 3. On U.S.-Soviet cultural exchanges during the Cold War, see Yale Richmond, U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchange, 1958–1986: Who Wins? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987). 4. Jinx Coleman Broussard and Skye Chance Cooley, “William Worthy (Jr): The Man and the Mis- sion,” Journalism Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2009), pp. 386–400; Yunxiang Gao, “W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China,” Du Bois Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2013), pp. 59–85; David Lev- ering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000); Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro- American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Robeson Taj Frazier, The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Matthew D. John- son, “From Peace to the Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-American Transnational Networks, 1949–1979,” Past and Present, Vol. 218, Suppl. 8 (2013), pp. 233–257; Robeson Taj Frazier, “Thun- der in the East: China, Exiled Crusaders, and the Unevenness of Black Internationalism,” American Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 4 (December 2011), pp. 929–951; Mullen, Afro-Orientalism; Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); and Robin D. G. Helley and Betsy Esch, “Black like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Fall 1999), pp. 6–41. 115 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00814 by guest on 30 September 2021 Li it has paid little attention to the critical role played by the PRC in build- ing the new black bridge and turning it into an instrument to confront the United States on the cultural front. As a result, Sino-American relations in the Cold War years have continued to be viewed mostly as a series of military confrontations and diplomatic maneuvers. This article attempts to fill part of the void by examining Sino-American cultural relations in the Cold War with a sharp focus on Beijing’s close in- teraction with African-American activists. Based mostly on archived govern- ment records and personal documents in English as well as Chinese, the article shows that the PRC, besides confronting the United States in mil- itary and diplomatic arenas, engaged it actively on the cultural front. The invitations extended to a large number of black activists were part of that engagement. This unique transnational interaction was started by the PRC in the mid-1950s to break the information isolation imposed by Washing- ton, and it was expanded in the 1960s to become an instrument for Beijing to compete with the Soviet Union as the leader of world Communism and to undermine Washington’s position at home and abroad. The PRC earned admiration from almost all of the African-American visitors and spread the teachings of the “Little Red Book” of Chairman Mao Zedong to black com- munities and college campuses in the United States, but it was unable to turn the civil-rights movement into an armed revolution capable of destroying the stronghold of the capitalist world. The black bridge began to fade not only because of the immense progress achieved by the U.S. civil rights movement but also because of Beijing’s decision at the beginning of the 1970s to seek a rapprochement with the United States, spurring the U.S. government to end its ban on travel to China. The examination of the rise and dissipation of the black bridge helps reveal the breadth of the Sino-American Cold War confrontation and the drastic changes in the nature, pattern, and function of cultural exchange between the two countries. Building a New Bridge When the Chinese authorities sent a “People’s Volunteer Army” to fight U.S. and South Korean forces in late October 1950, the clashes effectively sev- ered all cultural ties between China and the United States. Because Wash- ington prohibited U.S. citizens from transferring funds to and traveling in the PRC, Beijing banned U.S. movies, music, and radio, took over all cultural and educational institutions subsidized by U.S. organizations, and expelled most 116 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00814 by guest on 30 September 2021 China’s Interaction with African-American Activists during the Cold War U.S. citizens working in those institutions.5 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) even started a national movement to get rid of any “America-loving,” “America-worshipping,” or “America-fearing” sentiment in the PRC.6 Although the Korean War ended in July 1953, traditional cultural ties between China and the United States were not restored. Because of the deep- ened hostility caused by the war, U.S. officials instead became more deter- mined to contain and isolate the PRC. When the U.S. government finally agreed to begin direct talks with Beijing in Geneva in 1954, the only goal was to win the release of all U.S. citizens, including military personnel, cap- tured during the Korean War and detained in China.
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