In 1959 an aging W.E.B. Du Bois, then still living in the US, visited Beijing University, China’s most prestigious institute of higher learning, where he gave a powerful and provocative speech to a large audience. “China, after long centuries, has arisen to her feet and leapt forward,” he said. In a breathtaking and earnest expression of solidarity he implored Africans to follow in China’s footsteps, turn away from the West and to “stand straight, speak and think!” “China is flesh of your flesh and blood of your blood”, he dramatically declared. The speech, part of a national celebration of Du Bois’ birthday, was hugely impactful not least because Beijing Radio broadcasted it globally.

Du Bois was known for his sympathies with East Asia’s great powers. He believed the “color line” was the main cleavage in world politics and that European racism and colonialism were a common blight that Africans and Asians should unite to confront. He wrote enthusiastically in support of Japan during its early 20th century war with Russia, viewing Japan’s victory as one that belonged to all non-white people.

He was initially an ardent believer that Japan would lead what he called the “darker world” to freedom from colonial rule, but following its defeat in World War II he anointed Beijing despite the fact that he sometimes whitewashed and at other times supported Japan’s violence in China during the war. But his belief that China could lead the Third World chimed well with Chairman Mao Zedong as well as Premier Zhou Enlai, who worked to position China as a leader and lighthouse for former colonies seeking liberation.

Socialism, Du Bois believed, was the remedy to the dreaded “color line” and he wasn’t quiet about it, despite the fever pitch of Cold War politics that often got him into trouble. In 1951 he was arrested for his vocal and dedicated activism for the USSR and China following allegations that he was spying for a foreign country. His efforts didn’t go unnoticed and when he was arrested China vigorously protested. Chinese officials would also fete him during his many visits between 1959 and 1962. Such was his standing that upon his death Mao sent a letter to Shirley Graham Du Bois, his wife, offering his condolences. He was a “great man of our time”, wrote Mao, whose friendship would “forever remain in the memory of the Chinese people.”  A prominent activist in her own right, Graham Du Bois would go on to settle in China after his death.

Du Bois’ life was one among a handful of examples according to Professor Yunxiang Gao’s new book, Africa Rise, China Roar, which examines the “intertwined lives” of a group of activists, artists and intellectuals “who strove in their own ways to create a politicized transpacific discourse” by linking up with their Chinese counterparts. Whilst many of the key characters in her book, such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois are by now household names, Gao’s book also sheds light upon their China-based collaborators, as well as their spouses and partners, who played important roles but for the most part were consigned to the “dustbin of history.”

Robeson often dedicated his music to furthering the cause of labor, but one particular song called Chee Lai, which he recorded with Liu Liangmo, a Christian activist and journalist,  would go on to inspire millions across China for generations to come. The Chinese Communist Party would rename the song “March of Volunteers” and make it the anthem for the Peoples’ Republic. In Moscow in 1934 Robeson would meet Si-Lan Chen, a popular revolutionary choreographer and committed anti-imperialist of Sino-Afro-Caribbean descent.

Though Chen didn’t initially enjoy the approval of her contemporaries, who said her work contained no “proletarian ideology,” she later enthusiastically reinvented herself as the Communist answer to Josephine Baker. Her brother, a journalist, would describe her as “the new woman of the awakened East.” The Herald dubbed her and Madame Sun Yat-sen (wife of Chinese nationalist intellectual Sun Yat-sen) the “two most prominent women in China.” Despite her fascinating life and the impact of her performances and musicals, when Chen attempted to write a memoir, one publisher took interest in the people she’d enjoyed the company of but said it might be more interesting if she could provide “new information or closer views of the famous persons you mention.” The book apparently wasn’t that interesting because it was mainly about her.

In addition to meeting Robeson in Moscow, Chen also met Harlem poet Langston Hughes who visited the Soviet Union to film Black and White, a movie about race relations and labor disputes in the American south. They had a brief but passionate affair, regularly exchanging letters and poetry, which this book doesn’t overlook. She was like a “delicate, flowerlike girl, beautiful in a reedy, golden-skinned sort of way” Hughes said of Chen, “Si-lan was the girl I was in love with that winter.” Despite his insistence that she come to visit him in the US, Chen wasn’t convinced they could build a life together. “We’d live together, maybe a day, a week, I go east and you go west” she wrote to him, “I guess we’d have a good time while together, I suppose that’s as much as one can demand from this life of ours.”

Chen encouraged Hughes to visit China, which he eventually did, heading to Shanghai in 1933. According to Professor Gao Yunxiang, he said it was “incredible.” The warm welcome he received surprised him despite the fact that he was warned against entering Chinese quarters of the city. “I found the Chinese in Shanghai to be a very jolly people, much like colored folks at home,” he wrote in his memoir. He wasn’t the only African-American in Shanghai at that point, as Black Jazz bands dominated the city’s clubs, which Hughes said had a “weakness” for African-American culture.

Following his brief but entertaining sojourn, he threw down the gauntlet, writing a poem which incited China against the West: “Roar China, roar old lion of the east. Snort fire, yellow dragon of the Orient, tired at last of being bothered… You know what you want! The only way to get it is to take it!” This defiant solidarity was a common thread running through the art and activism of these personalities during their time in a China suffering because of its asymmetric relationship with Europe. They saw in China’s helplessness an echo of their own experiences as African-Americans in the US, and found a coterie of sympathetic Chinese counterparts with whom they could collaborate.

Du Bois and Hughes recognized and resented the presence of “Jim Crow” treatment against Chinese on their land. Chen noted with dismay how a people could be “so brutally excluded from a part of their own country.” They projected their own hopes onto China, encouraging it to break with its shackles and demonstrate the feebleness of the racial prejudices which had bound it to other colonized peoples by charting a path that they could follow.

In this interview conducted by Faisal Ali, Professor Yunxiang Gao speaks about her new book: