Africana People In China

During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals—including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams—traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice. In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad. He analyzes their diverse cultural output (newsletters, print journalism, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, lectures, and documentaries) to document how they imagined communist China’s role within a broader vision of a worldwide anticapitalist coalition against racism and imperialism.

Monograph examining the role of China foreign policy in Africa from 1958 to 1971 - traces the evolution of Chinese diplomacy, discusses conflicts with the USA and the USSR, considers China's attitude towards international relations, describes economic aid and trade programmes, and analyses Chinese political ideology and the efforts undertaken to encourage revolutionary social change, etc. Bibliography pp. 287 to 291, references and statistical tables.

Black in China tells the dynamic story of Aaron A. Vessup, a Black American teacher who, after decades of living in the shadow of America's racism, makes the radical decision to travel 8,000 miles to find a new future as an educator in China. Aaron's story spans the gulf between the crooked streets of South-Central LA and the crowded lanes of modern Beijing, providing a rich and intimate view of China today through the eyes of a Black man. Aaron grapples with issues of race and history in both America and China, exploring why he would prefer to be "Black Chinese", not "Black American."

Premodern Chinese described a great variety of the peoples they encountered as "black." The earliest and most frequent of these encounters were with their Southeast Asian neighbors, specifically the Malayans. But by the midimperial times of the seventh through seventeenth centuries C.E., exposure to peoples from Africa, chiefly slaves arriving from the area of modern Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, gradually displaced the original Asian "blacks" in Chinese consciousness. In The Blacks of Premodern China, Don J. Wyatt presents the previously unexamined story of the earliest Chinese encounters with this succession of peoples they have historically regarded as black. A series of maritime expeditions along the East African coastline during the early fifteenth century is by far the best known and most documented episode in the story of China's premodern interaction with African blacks. Just as their Western contemporaries had, the Chinese aboard the ships that made landfall in Africa encountered peoples whom they frequently classified as savages. Yet their perceptions of the blacks they met there differed markedly from those of earlier observers at home in that there was little choice but to regard the peoples encountered as free. The premodern saga of dealings between Chinese and blacks concludes with the arrival in China of Portuguese and Spanish traders and Italian clerics with their black slaves in tow. In Chinese writings of the time, the presence of the slaves of the Europeans becomes known only through sketchy mentions of black bondservants. Nevertheless, Wyatt argues that the story of these late premodern blacks, laboring anonymously in China under their European masters, is but a more familiar extension of the previously untold story of their ancestors who toiled in Chinese servitude perhaps in excess of a millennium earlier.

This book examines the history of Africans and African-Americans in Mainland China and Taiwan, the Chinese and African nation's relationship and its political repercussions for Mainland China and Taiwan, and the Chinese/African-American social relationships in the United States. Although the Chinas are thought by western societies to advocate racial equality in their respective countries, this book uncovers the everyday racial attitudes of the Chinese people and governments toward Africans and African-Americans. In this book, crucial events in the Chinas such as the forced opening of China by the west and Chinese philosophical views throughout her history, are analyzed in how they have been instrumental in shaping racial attitudes that have led to racial polarization, racial violence and race riots against Africans and African-Americans in the Chinas.

Examines Chinese engagement in Africa, focusing on (1) Chinese and African goals, (2) African perceptions of China, (3) how China has adjusted its policies to address local reactions, and (4) whether the United States and China compete in the region.

Any book on Africa-China relations which steers away from hegemonic western perspectives and paradigms is welcome. This is one such book. Issa G. Shivji, Mwalimu Nyerere Professor of Pan-African Studies, University of Dar es Salaam --