The Red Star Shines with the Panthers
Red Star Shines with the Panthers: Largely Unknown History of the PRC’s Historical Support for Black Liberation in the U.S.
This article was written by Zhang Sheng, a guest writer for Glór na nÓg.
ZHANG Sheng (Research Fellow of the Chengdu Institute of World Affairs, Research Fellow of the International Peace Institute-Nepal, and Honorary Expert Advisor of the Jeevraj Ashrit Foundation)
On June 1st, when asked to comment on the tragedy of George Floyd caused by police brutality, Mr. Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, clearly declared, “Black lives matter and their human rights should be guaranteed.” Zhao’s statement illustrated the fact that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) affirmatively stands in solidarity with all the oppressed people of color around the world, of course including those living in the United States. China’s support for African American people’s struggle for liberation unsurprisingly irritated the U.S. establishment and mainstream media which strive to monopolize the concept of “human rights” as an American invention and to demonize the PRC as a so-called “authoritarian state violating human rights.” Foreign Policy magazine, for example, is so afraid that American people may start to realize the progressive nature of the PRC on the issue of black liberation that it quickly published an article written by Ho-Fung Hung, a Hong Kong separatist scholar at Johns Hopkins University whose entire career is mostly about writing anti-China propaganda. In that article, Hung demonizes China as an “imperialist” country and ask everyone “not to be fooled” by China’s anti-racist stance. While he spends most parts of the article on accusing China for wanting to change the existing world order (which is exactly the topic that imperialist scholars in the U.S. are most interested in talking about), he either ignorantly or intentionally did not touch on the PRC’s prolonged support black liberation ever since the Maoist era.
Is the PRC sincere about Black Lives Matter? History of the PRC provides the most persuasive answer and the historical solidarity between the Chinese and Black people can never be distorted and censored by imperialist propaganda.
The PRC’s friendship with African Americans can be traced all the way to early 1950s right after its establishment. From 1950 to 1953, the PRC entered the Korean War, fighting against the allied forces filled with 17 states. In November of 1952, the Chinese Volunteer Army surrendered a company of American soldiers and noticed that all of those soldiers were African Americans. Thus the Chinese soldiers shouted, “Black American brothers, we promise to treat our captives well. Do not fight for the bourgeoisies of Wall Street anymore. Surrender now.” This company of Black soldiers from the 25th division of the U.S. Army, 115 soldiers in total, quickly surrendered. Historical memoirs from both sides narrates that this group of Black soldiers told the Chinese counterpart that they suffered severe from racial oppression both in the army and the U.S. society, and as the result some of them chose to stay in China for rest of their life and never went back to the U.S. This is probably the earliest case of friendship between the PRC and African Americans.
No matter how hard capitalists try to demonize the Socialist states, the historical fact is that Socialist states were regarded by their contemporary world as a progressive force of liberation. Just like the newly independent Third World states naturally found the Socialist Bloc as their ally against Western colonialism and imperialism, radical African American activists also saw the Socialist Bloc as their natural ally against oppression caused by racism, capitalism, and imperialism. Socialist states such as Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Vietnam all kept very warm friendship with Black activists such as Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Robert Williams and Angela Davis and Socialist governments in the world launched many declarations condemning the existence of racist oppression, segregation, and discrimination in the U.S.
After the newly established PRC solved most of its domestic challenges in the 1950s, its support for international comrades massively increased. In May, 1959, Chairman Mao Zedong met with famous African-American activists W.E.B. Du Bois and expressed his support for African American struggle for liberation.
Those who are familiar with Malcolm X’s struggle would vividly remember the photo that Malcolm took with Cuban leader Fidel Castro and the letter that Che Guevara wrote to him in support of Black Liberation.
What many people do not know about, however, is that the PRC also sincerely invited him to visit China. As Yuri Kochiyama, a civil rights activist and a close comrade of Malcolm X, writes in her memoir, Malcolm X admires Chairman Mao’s struggle against foreign domination, corruption in the government, and feudalism. Shared revolutionary ideals formed a spiritual bridge linking Malcolm X and the PRC. After his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964, Malcolm X visited Egypt and met with President Nasser. Later, he visited newly independent African states such as Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana. In Ghana, Chinese Ambassador Huang Hua, representing the PRC, sincerely invited him to visit Beijing. Due to the conflict of schedules, Malcolm X unfortunately was not able to make it to visit Beijing, but he recommended Vicki Garvin, a famous female Black activist and a member of the U.S. Communist Party, to visit China. Garvin chose to stay in China and later became a professor at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute. She was later promoted as an editor of the Peking Review newspaper until she returns to the U.S. in 1970.
Vicki Gavin is not the only Black activist who received support and solidarity from the PRC. Robert Williams, another revolutionary Black activist who strongly believes in Mao’s idea that “power grows out of the barrel of the gun” and wrote the famous book Negro with Guns, highly appreciates Chairman Mao’s idea of regarding the “Afro-American's struggle for liberation” as “a part of an invincible world-wide movement” and appraised Chairman Mao as “the first world leader to elevate our people's struggle to the fold of the world revolution.” In 1963, Williams escaped to Cuba under U.S. persecution and later moved to China. Mao was deeply impressed by Williams’ struggle and warmly welcomed him while Williams asked Mao to sign on his copy of Quotations of Mao Zedong.
At Williams’ behest, Chairman wrote his famous article named “Oppose Radical Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism” and published it on the People’s Daily on August 8th, 1963. In this article, Chairman Mao declares,
“I call upon the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisie, and other enlightened personages of all colors in the world, white, black, yellow, brown, etc., to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practiced by U.S. imperialism and to support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination.”
In support of the oppressed minorities in the U.S., Chairman Mao also left the his famous quote that “we are the majority and they are the minority” by pointing out that the racist ruling class in the U.S. “at most make up less than ten percent of the 3,000 million people of the world” while the vast majority of people in the world, including “the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals, and other enlightened persons”, are in support of African American people’s struggle for liberation. Therefore, he concludes,
“I am deeply convinced that, with the support of more than ninety per cent of the people of the world, the just struggle of the American Negroes will certainly be victorious. The evil system of colonialism and imperialism grew on along with the enslavement of the Negroes and the trade in Negroes; it will surely come to its end with the thorough emancipation of the black people.”
After Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Chairman Mao published his second article about the topic of Black liberation in the U.S. This article was published on the People’s Daily on April 18th, 1968, and the title is “Statement in Support of the Afro-American Struggle Against Violent Repression.” In the article, Mao lamented, “Martin Luther King was an exponent of nonviolence. Nevertheless, the U.S. imperialists did not on that account show any tolerance toward him, but used counter-revolutionary violence and killed him in cold blood.” He affirmatively supports the “storm of Afro-American struggle” following King’s death and argued that “the Afro-American struggle is not only a struggle waged by the exploited and oppressed Black people for freedom and emancipation, it is also a new clarion call to all the exploited and oppressed people of the United States to fight against the barbarous rule of the monopoly capitalist class.” In the end of the article, he again calls for revolution in support of the Black liberation struggle:
“The struggle of the Black people in the United States for emancipation is a component part of the general struggle of all the people of the world against U.S. imperialism, a component part of the contemporary world revolution. I call on the workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals of all countries and all who are willing to fight against U.S. imperialism to take action and extend strong support to the struggle of the Black people in the United States! People of the whole world, unite still more closely and launch a sustained and vigorous offensive against our common enemy, U.S. imperialism, and its accomplices! It can be said with certainty that the complete collapse of colonialism, imperialism, and all systems of exploitation, and the complete emancipation of all the oppressed peoples and nations of the world are not far off.”
Three years after the publication of this article, the PRC again welcomes new honored African American guests at Beijing. In September, 1971, famous Black Panther leader Huey Newton visited Beijing and received welcoming from Premier Zhou Enlai.
On October 1st, the National Day of the PRC, Newton participated in the National Day parade in which tens of thousands of people gathered at Tiananmen Square, the symbol of Chinese revolution, and celebrated the global struggle against imperialism. The Black Panthers were honored as national guests of China and received respects and applauding from the Chinese people in the parade. In his meeting with Premier Zhou, Newton asked the PRC to “negotiate with Nixon for the freedom of the oppressed peoples of the world.”
In his interview with American Journalist Edgar Snow in 1965, Chairman Mao promised that “China supported revolutionary movements, but not by invading countries. Of course, whenever a liberation struggle existed China would publish statements and call demonstrations to support it.” All of those aforementioned supports that the PRC has provided for African American people’s struggle for liberation prove that Mao has fulfilled his words faithfully. The Peoples’ Republic of China during the Maoist era, as a revolutionary Socialist state, affirmatively stands in solidarity with the world’s all oppressed nations’ struggle against imperialism, colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Although it is undeniable that the PRC today is probably not as active as it was during the Maoist era, previous heritages left over by Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou to their fellow compatriots today still lives in the veins of the PRC and have never been forgotten. The friendship between Chinese people and the African Americans, two victims of Western colonialism, imperialism, and racism, has been existing and strong from the early 1950s to the present.
Regarding African American people’s current struggle for liberation in the U.S. today, I would like to conclude this article with a quote from Chairman’s “Oppose Radical Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism”:
“The Kennedy Administration has resorted to cunning two-faced tactics. On the one hand, it continues to connive at and take part in the discrimination against and persecution of Negroes; it even sends troops to repress them. On the other hand, it is parading as an advocate the ‘defense of human rights’ and the ‘protection of the civil rights of Negroes’, is calling upon the Negro people to exercise ‘restraint’, and is proposing to Congress so-called ‘civil rights legislation’ in an attempt to numb the fighting will of the Negro people and deceive the masses throughout the country.”
It seems like exactly what Mao warned people in 1963 is still taking place today in 2020. To fundamentally solve the structural violence that African Americans are facing today, one still need to deeply analyze the intractable and intertwining relationship of racial inequality and class inequality in the U.S.