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.