“Le Diable Est Devenu Chinois”: Cold War Suspicion and Afro-Asian Worlds in Josie Fanon’s Journalism

This paper intervenes in debates on Cold War suspicion, circuits of state intelligence and Afro-Asian political histories by foregrounding the journalism of Josie Fanon, a French-born, Algeria-based journalist. Drawing on a close reading of selected articles written between 1964 and 1978 and published primarily in El Moudjahid and Révolution africaine, the paper examines how China emerged as a shifting figure of threat, solidarity and projection within Third Worldist political discourse.

Josie Fanon’s journalism makes legible how geopolitical anxiety moved through Algerian debates on nuclear warfare, United Nations representation and Afro-Asian alliance-making, from commentary on China’s nuclear tests and the Vietnam War to coverage of UN struggles over China’s seat and Algerian–Chinese development cooperation. Rather than treating intelligence as a closed domain of classified knowledge, these articles show how assessments of threat and strategic intent were produced in public through revolutionary journalism that interpreted military buildup, diplomatic manoeuvres and development aid as matters of global security.

Writing from Algiers, politically aligned with the FLN and embedded in feminist and Third Worldist networks, Josie Fanon worked at a moment when China displaced the Soviet Union as the primary object of US strategic anxiety, a shift sharpened in her critiques of US nuclear strategy, Vietnam War diplomacy and figures such as Henry Kissinger. Her reporting produced racialised narratives in which China appeared as menace, protector and guarantor of moral legitimacy within the Third World. The recurring formulation “Le diable est devenu chinois” names this shift directly.

Read together, these interventions show that Cold War security operated not only through surveillance or classified intelligence, but also through widely circulating journalistic narratives that shaped political judgement, alliance-making and competing visions of the global order.