Module: Internationalist Activism and Solidarity

This module revolves around one of the key themes we covered in our publications, that is, internationalist activism and solidarity, notably the ways in which Chinese activists, both abroad and within China, have engaged with global social justice movements. The module is articulated in five clusters. In the first, we discuss some of the ideas that underpin historical antecedents of present-day transnational solidarity in China, notably the arc of anticolonial, Asianist, and Third-World movements that emerged in the early twentieth century and which gained traction during the Mao era. The second focuses on the lived experiences of individuals, especially construction workers, engineers, and doctors, that participated in top-down attempts by the Chinese Party-State to foster international cooperation with the developing world. In the third, we zoom in on one specific facet of international solidarity, that is Black activism, with a series of pieces that offer different perspectives on how Blackness has been imagined, defined, or practised in different moments of contemporary Chinese history. In the fourth, we shift to today, with a group of essays that explores the complexity, diversity, and challenges of the Chinese diaspora’s activism and solidarity efforts across the world, highlighting how they navigate their positionality in contexts where Chinese nationals are often regarded with suspicion. Finally, we offer a few perspectives on transnational activism related to ethnic minorities.

Ideas

• Timothy Cheek, ‘Chinese Asianism Yesterday and Today: A Conversation with Craig Smith’, Made in China Journal 6(3), 2022, pp. 178–85. Link.

In his book Chinese Asianism: 1894–1945 (Harvard University Asia Centre 2021), Craig Smith analyses the Chinese intellectual discussions of East Asian solidarity, in connection with Chinese nationalism and Sino–Japanese relations. During Western imperialism in the early twentieth century, Asianism was a call for Asian unity, but advocates of a united and connected Asia based on racial or civilisational commonalities also utilised the packaging of Asia for their own agendas, leading to a field of contesting aspirations rather than a single ideology.

• Teng Wei, ‘Third World’, in Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, edited by Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere, ANU Press and Verso Books, Canberra, London and New York, 2019, pp. 281–85. Link.

The revolutionary origins of the term ‘Third World’ in China are now buried under a litany of developmental discourse. In China in the twenty-first century, belonging to the third world is not a source of pride and transnational revolutionary potential as it was in the Mao era, but a stigmatised and shameful mark of backwardness from which China has distanced itself. In this chapter in the volume Afterlives of Chinese Communism, Wei Teng traces the changing connotation of the concept, from the starting point for revolution to the beginning of a technocratic development path.

• Yawen Li, ‘Spectres of Anticolonial Internationalism in Contemporary China’, Made in China Journal 9(1), 2024, pp. 60–67. Link.

This essay excavates the role of internationalism as a key dimension of radical leftist thought in Chinese modern history, highlighting the impact of transnational connections on the country’s anticolonial past while also demonstrating the approach’s diminishing influence as the nation-state has gradually become a dominant framework within the Chinese left. By examining creative expressions of solidarity from mainland China to recent global social movements for Ukraine and Gaza, it offers insights into legacies of radical internationalism and anticolonial imagination in China today.

Lived Experiences

• Christian Sorace and Ruiyi Zhu, ‘The Short-Lived Eternity of Friendship: Chinese Workers in Socialist Mongolia (1955–1964)’, in Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, edited by Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace, Verso Books, London and New York, 2022, pp. 251–64. Link.

Starting in the mid-1950s, Beijing experimented with ‘proletarian diplomacy’ as a new form of international relations with other socialist countries. By sending Chinese workers abroad, the Chinese authorities were not only pursuing pragmatic goals, but also responding to broader ideological imperatives rooted in the communist belief in internationalism, with all the paradoxes this entailed. This chapter in Proletarian China tracks how Chinese labour diplomacy panned out in Mongolia, in a short-lived experiment launched in 1955 and prematurely cut short by the Sino-Soviet rift of the early 1960s.

• Matthew Galway,  ‘Building Uhuru: Chinese Workers and Labour Diplomacy on the Tan-Zam Railway’, in Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, edited by Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace, Verso Books, London and New York, 2022, pp. 416–25. Link.

In the wake of the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, China shifted its foreign policy towards supporting Third World countries against US and Soviet imperialism. This involved increased Chinese foreign aid and construction of infrastructure projects globally, particularly in Africa. The Tanzania–Zambia Railway, built in the 1970s, symbolises Sino-African friendship. This chapter explores the experiences of Chinese workers and experts involved in these projects, highlighting China’s role in fostering Third World socialism.

• Jamie Monson, ‘Learning by Heart: Training for Self-Reliance on the TAZARA Railway, 1968–1976’, Made in China Journal 6(2), 2021, pp. 95–103. Link.

Like today’s China–Africa infrastructure projects, the construction of the TAZARA railway between 1968 and 1975 embodied an intersection of political and economic motivations that belies the artificial binary of socialism/capitalism, or ideology/practicality, that is often projected on the history of this Cold War era. By analysing the ways in which often contradictory development priorities came together—including how they shaped, and were shaped by, the workers themselves—this essay highlights the significance and long-term impact of infrastructure development in China–Africa engagements across time and space.

• Dongxin Zou, ‘The Politics of Care: Unveiling the Dynamics of Chinese Medical Labour in Algeria, 1960s – 1980s’, Global China Pulse 2(1), 2023, pp. 57–65. Link.

In the context of official Chinese medical aid to Algeria from the 1960s to the 1980s, this essay explores medicine as a labour process and provides insights into the multifaceted nature of Chinese medical humanitarianism, leading to a re-evaluation of its ethics and politics. It approaches aid doctors as labourers whose medical labour power was transformed into healthcare practice through negotiating complex relations of production among themselves, health authorities, and patients during the process of providing care.

• Yidong Gong, ‘From ‘Medical Revolution’ to Techno-Politics: The Transformation of Chinese Medical Teams in Zanzibar’, Global China Pulse 2(1), 2023, pp. 75–85. Link.

Drawing on fieldwork with a Chinese medical team in Zanzibar in the 2010s, this essay highlights how socialism and capitalism, technology and morality, and structure and agency are intertwined in the health sector in Zanzibar. It presents how these symbols are negotiated and reconfigured in post-socialist African countries such as Tanzania following the transformation brought about by Chinese medical aid.

• Hong Zhang, ‘Builders from China: From Third-World Solidarity to Globalised State Capitalism’, Made in China Journal 6(2), 2021, pp. 87–94. Link.

China’s international contracting deserves more analytical attention, as Chinese companies in this sector have emerged as some of the world’s largest, and their activities undergird China’s global infrastructure development under the Belt and Road Initiative. Tracing the history of this industry since the 1970s, this essay shows that its phenomenal rise exemplifies China’s strategic approach to globalisation and its state capitalist economic structure. Nowadays, this industry serves to incorporate economic peripheries into global capitalism with the Chinese state playing a prominent role.

Black Activism

• Kun Huang, ‘Afro-Asian Parallax: The Harlem Renaissance, Literary Blackness, and Chinese Left-Wing Translations’, Made in China Journal  9(1), 2024, pp. 162–69. Link.

Just as China emerged as a revolutionary trope in interwar Black internationalist imaginaries, Shanghai-based journals started to introduce African American writing to Chinese readers. This essay traces early translations of Black literature in Republican-era China and unpacks the parallactic visions as the Harlem Renaissance travelled across the Pacific. Literary Blackness built on and expanded the discourse of ‘minor nations’ and mediated the convergence of transnational left-wing cultures. Chinese translators and critics also reshaped Black literature’s political valency through textual practices, revealing situated differences that conditioned early encounters of Black internationalism and the Chinese left wing.

• Ruodi Duan, ‘Black Nationalism and Maoism: Revisiting the Relationship’,  Made in China Journal  9(1), 2024, pp. 170–73. Link.

This essay deconstructs the high tide of encounter between China and African American liberation movements. While Chinese narratives in the 1960s promoted a linear vision of Black militancy that would join forces with the white working class, Black Power activists engaged with Maoism as a framework for a politics of racial nationalism that did not always aspire to interracial and anticapitalist coalition-building as its goal. As the project of Afro-Chinese solidarity lost political importance in the post-Mao era, state representatives and official channels within China no longer championed anti-racism to counter potential popular expressions of prejudice.

• James Gethyn Evans, ‘Maoism, Anti-Imperialism, and the Third World’, Made in China Journal 6(2), 2021, pp. 139–46. Link.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Maoist China became a symbol for anti-imperialist movements throughout an imagined ‘Third World’. While scholarly attention has been paid to Third- World Maoism in countries of the Global South, fewer scholars have considered how Maoism was received by organisations within the ‘First World’ that considered themselves part of the global Third-World struggle against oppression. This essay helps to address this gap by examining how the Black Panther Party in the United States was inspired by Mao Zedong’s writings and formed connections with the Chinese Communist Party.

• Zifeng Liu, ‘Tracing the Chinese Arc of Black Internationalist Feminism: An Archive Story’, Made in China Journal  9(1), 2024, pp. 174–80. Link.

This essay attempts to recover Mabel Robinson Williams, an African American radical woman, as a key figure in the history of Black internationalism in China. In reconstructing her travels to China and interactions with its bureaucrats and intellectuals, it reveals and interrogates the gendered and sexualised terms under which she appears in the Chinese archive of Afro-Asian solidarity. While Robinson Williams’ own vision of alternatives to global racial capitalism can be gleaned from those records, her overall archival representation as the wife and helpmate of a bombastic, better-known male activist diminishes her role. A close examination of the sources reveals the simplification of her story by her husband, Robert Williams, and the Chinese Communist Party, and the normalisation of heteromasculinity in the making of radical solidarities.

• Maya Singhal, ‘Broken Windows’, Made in China Journal 9(1), 2024, pp. 181–87. Link.

Scholarship on Black and Asian solidarity tends to focus on explicit political activism. However, community ties are developed more frequently in smaller moments. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s theory of ‘revolution in a minor key’, this essay explores Black and Chinese collaborations in quality-of-life crimes—fare evasion and illegal street vending of counterfeit designer goods—in New York City’s Chinatown to consider how these minor crimes and everyday activities might be sites in which to develop working-class, anti-state solidarities

Student and Diaspora Activism Today

• Xu Bin, ‘The World Is Yours! Youth and Civic Engagement from Sichuan to Parkland’, Made in China Journal 3(1), 2018, 56–61. Link.

In the wake of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, millions of young volunteers were driven by sorrow, love, and compassion to travel to Sichuan to help with the relief effort. A similar movement of spontaneous, self-organised, and idealistic youths emerged from the 2018 Parkland school shooting in the US However, many in the former group, in contrast to the latter, failed to transcend the boundary between simple volunteering and the type of activism necessary to address the causes of suffering.

• Shan Windscript, ‘Can Chinese Students Abroad Speak? Asserting Political Agency amid Australian Nationalist Anxiety’, Made in China Journal 4(3), 2019, pp. 29–35. Link.

Australian nationalist narratives often portrayed overseas mainland Chinese students as passive victims of CCP brainwashing amid the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. To challenge these stereotypes, this article suggests fostering political engagement and dialogue to help amplify diverse perspectives and build solidarities with Chinese students, using an approach that recognises their critical opinions on the Hong Kong protests in the face of possible retribution and self-censorship.

• Mengyang Zhao, ‘Chinese Diaspora Activism and the Future of International Solidarity’, Made in China Journal 5(2), 2020, pp. 97–101. Link.

Diaspora activism is frequently perceived as limited to activists’ involvement in topics directly related to their homelands, which are often non-democracies with repressive systems. This essay argues that such essentialist perceptions snatch away the agency of diaspora populations, and curbs our ability to imagine the breadth and depth of transnational activism that is taking place today. In reality, diaspora activists use their observed criticisms and differences between transnational movements as resources for future activism.

• Jin Xianan and Ni Leiyun, ‘Outsider Within: Young Chinese Feminist Activism in the Age of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom’, Made in China Journal 6(1), 2021, pp. 30–35. Link.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked increasing racist violence against Chinese communities in the United Kingdom. In this essay, two UK-based Chinese feminists discuss their first-hand experiences while campaigning against racism during the crisis. While constantly suffering from oppressive structures, constraints, and limits as ‘outsider within’ British society, they describe how they managed to expand the scope and depth of their campaigns and build connections with feminists and anti-racist activists across borders and boundaries.

• Norie, ‘Are You Okay?’, Made in China Journal, 27 May 2024. Link.

In this essay, a Chinese student in Middle Eastern Studies recounts her transformative experience attending several protests around the pro-Palestine encampment movement on campuses in New York. In the company of empathetic peers from various backgrounds all driven by a shared purpose, she found the courage to shed her insecurities around identity and lean into her moral convictions.

• Wu Qin, ‘A Letter from a Tehran Prison.’ Made in China Journal, 20 December 2023. Link.

In this short story, Wu Qin transplants her experiences combatting government repression during China’s COVID-19 pandemic into an imaginary setting in Iran, a disguise which allowed her to disseminate her story while temporarily avoiding censorship. It also shows how she and other Chinese activists draw connections between transnational protest movements, as a way to both engage with global affairs and reflect their own experience of government repression.

Ethnic Minorities and Transnational Activism

• Séagh Kehoe, ‘Chinese Feminism, Tibet, and Xinjiang’, in Xinjiang Year Zero, edited by Darren Byler, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere, ANU Press, Canberra, 2022, pp. 211–18. Link.

While the Chinese feminist movement is good at making international connections and is characterised by an explicit concern for intersectionality, it generally overlooks how experiences of gender and ethnicity in China overlap in complex and often brutal ways. In this essay, Séagh Kehoe looks into the plight of women and ethnic minorities in the borderland areas of Tibet and Xinjiang, and argues for increased attention and social mobilisation from abroad to address these issues.

• Dawa Lokyitsang, ‘Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity’, Made in China Journal 9(1), 2024, pp. 142–147. Link.

By analysing the differences in where, when, and why Tibetans in exile either define or refuse to define themselves as an indigenous group, this essay highlights how indigeneity is a political concept constructed and contested between settler-colonial governments and indigenous anticolonial sovereignty movements. Indigeneity can thereby go beyond symbolic categorisation of peoples and instead be leveraged to forge strategic, transnational solidarities for native nations combating settler governmentality.

• Mirshad Ghalip, ‘Language Ideology as Identity in the Uyghur Diaspora’, Made in China Journal  9(1), 2024, pp. 130–37. Link.

This essay delves into the language ideologies of the Uyghur diaspora community in the United States and their efforts to maintain their heritage language. It argues that the language ideologies of these Uyghurs significantly influence their language maintenance practices, such as forming social connections with like-minded individuals and enforcing rules at home for language maintenance. Additionally, the ongoing settler-colonial process of eliminating Uyghur identity in the Uyghur homeland is fostering a transnational language ideology that views the Uyghur language as integral to Uyghur identity and speaking Uyghur as a form of resistance.

Featured Image: Giulia Forsythe (CC), Flickr.com