Over the past decade, we have published hundreds of essays in our journals, platforms, and books. This represents the collective expertise of hundreds of scholars and practitioners who have agreed to share their insights with us and our readers. Instead of letting this vast trove of material rest in our archives, we have decided to draw from it to offer a series of ‘modules’ on key topics that feature prominently in current discussions about China. Later, we aim to combine these modules and enrich them with further multimedia material in broader syllabi that we hope will be useful to educators teaching about China.
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.
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