“The Vexing Limits of Translation”: Robert Williams, China, and the Question of Class and Nation in the Afro-Asian Radical Imagination

This presentation draws on the recently reclassified Chinese government documents regarding the African American militant Robert Williams’s 1963 and 1964 visits to China, all entitled “Report on Foreign Guests,” to explore Beijing’s speculation, suspicion, and confusion over his ideological credentials and revolutionary commitment. Chinese government officials’ sense of uncertainty and unease was initially provoked by the disagreement between him and the Chinese Communist Party over how factors of race and class interacted to produce and perpetuate Black unfreedom in the U.S. and what direction the civil rights movement should take. This divergence of opinion and strategy came into sharpest relief with the Chinese party-state’s intense mass propaganda campaigns aimed to inculcate the central idea of Mao Zedong’s “Statement Supporting the American Negroes in Their Just Struggle against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism”: “national struggle is a matter of class struggle.” Aware that Williams took issue with Mao’s view, Chinese officials and intellectuals anxiously attempted to impel him to embrace the chairman’s model of revolution while entertaining him and taking him on tours of the country. But to their disappointment, he continued to resist this subsumption of race under class. In examining the congruences and discrepancies between Williams’s revolutionary blueprint and China’s vision of national and international liberation, this presentation illuminates how and why Beijing made persistent efforts to manufacture consensus about the merits of privileging economic class over race and highlights Williams’s attempt to craft an independent political position and be a player rather than a pawn in the Cold War.