The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination

摘要

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.