On a mild summer afternoon in May 1919, thousands of students amassed in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. Not a week before, the belligerents of World War I had convened in Paris to bring an official end to the calamitous conflict that had engulfed the globe since 1914. However, the nascent Chinese republic, left impotent and unstable by decades of European imperialism, failed to secure Chinese interests at the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles. In an act of appeasement that provoked nationalist outrage and rebuke among Chinese youth, the Allied powers granted German colonial possessions in China to imperial Japan. Rallying for principles such as science, democracy, and patriotism, student-led demonstrations across China, collectively known as the May Fourth Movement, would forever set the course of China’s political development.
Little more than a century later, these demonstrations were the subject of remarks delivered this past May by U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger. In a thought-provoking discourse, Pottinger described how leaders of the May Fourth Movement embodied the principles of democracy and human dignity. Invoking Hu Shih, a public intellectual who championed the use of vernacular language as a means to democratize Chinese public discourse, along with P.C. Chang’s contributions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Taiwan’s current democratic status, Pottinger dismissed the “cliché that Chinese people can’t be trusted with democracy.”
Pottinger’s appeal to democracy comes at a critical juncture in U.S.-China relations. As experts reflect on U.S. policy towards China across the past five decades, consensus has emerged that the U.S. project of liberal Chinese integration has failed. A consequence of slowing economic growth and nationalist ambition, China has grown increasingly assertive abroad and authoritarian at home. Anti-competitive market practices, political repression, widespread violation of human rights, and burgeoning Chinese financial influence around the world have placed significant strain on the bilateral relationship. Consequently, scholars and politicians alike have criticized U.S. naivety for believing that China could be encouraged towards democracy, let alone be integrated into a system characterized by accountability, free trade, and respect for human rights.
Now, as the U.S. awakens to its failure to effect democratic change, Washington is pivoting towards confrontation while experts debate how to best dampen the international allure of China’s authoritarian model. To peacefully compete and restore the credibility of global democracy, policymakers are now looking inwards, seeking to jumpstart American innovation and recommit to America’s democratic principles. However, there exists a significant obstacle to the credibility of American democracy that is often omitted from discussions of U.S.-China relations.
This is the issue of race in America. As policymakers and scholars of contemporary China seek to restore U.S. leadership and the credibility of global democracy, many have yet to acknowledge America’s greatest democratic crisis: the modern legacy of slavery, which manifests itself in widespread economic discrimination, health disparities (exacerbated by COVID-19), voter suppression, and the institutionalized murder of black Americans by para-militarized police. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, those seeking solutions to the China challenge must acknowledge how domestic racial prejudice undermines American democracy and renders China suspect of U.S. calls for global democracy. This requires policymakers and China-watchers to address an important omission in discussions of contemporary U.S.-China relations: how American racial prejudice contoured the China challenge it faces today.
China and the Shadow of Slavery
Since Africans were first forced across the Middle Passage to America in 1619, slavery and racial prejudice have stained the American democratic experiment. When the United States declared independence from England in 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” Yet even Thomas Jefferson himself, who penned these famous words, owned slaves. During the drafting of the Constitution in 1787, the framers were also careful to preserve the institution of chattel slavery. As described by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nikole Hannah Jones, the Constitution implied that “While liberty was the inalienable right of the people who would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the natural station of people who had any discernible drop of ‘black blood.’”
Even after the abolition of slavery in 1865, African Americans remained cast from democratic participation. The black codes restricted African Americans’ suffrage rights and legally relegated them to a source of cheap, exploitable labor. When Radical Reconstruction sought to repeal these repugnant laws and guarantee African Americans the right to vote, many legal provisions of the black codes would continue under Jim Crow laws until the 1960s. Criticizing American democracy in the wake of slavery, esteemed black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1896 that “it was the rise and growth among the slaves of a determination to be free and an active part of American democracy that forced American democracy continually to look into the depths… as long as there were people in America, slave or nominally free… our democracy had failed of its greatest mission.”
It was this failure of democracy that turned African American attention to East Asia in the late 19th century. As described by historian Marc S. Gallicchio, African Americans’ “own battle against race prejudice at home led them to sympathize with the nonwhite subjects of empire around the globe.” For example, in 1905, Japan’s shocking victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese war— the first time in modern history that a nonwhite power had defeated a white European rival— drew significant attention among African Americans engaged in the struggle for racial equality. Booker T. Washington, a venerated leader in the African American community at the time, commented that the “wonderful progress of the Japanese and their sudden rise to the position of one of the great nations of the world has nowhere been studied with greater interest or enthusiasm than by the Negroes of America.” In the words of Du Bois, Japan’s victory over Russia had pulled the rug beneath the “foolish modern magic of the word ‘white’.”
Feelings of solidarity among African Americans and the Chinese also existed as early as the late imperial period. Gallicchio points to the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review (AME), an influential journal among the African American middle class, which sympathized with the Qing Dynasty as it atrophied under European imperial domination. By the dynasty’s collapse in 1911, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The Crisis, alsoexpressed its wonder and support for the Chinese revolution— “Shall we welcome Chinese rebirth with salvos of applause? Why—er—yes.” However, it was Japan’s imperial ambitions in China that began to tarnish its image as a liberator of the nonwhite world.
Two months after the eruption of World War I, Japan invaded German colonial possessions on China’s Shandong Peninsula. An unmistakable act of imperialism, the invasion drew significant skepticism. Nevertheless, Japan remained a beacon of hope for many African Americans; little could be expected from U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a bigoted segregationist who invited Jim Crow into Washington. Consequently, as President Wilson rebuffed repeated protests for racial equality, many of America’s most esteemed civil rights leaders saw Japan as an invaluable ally. However, few today realize that the Western commitment to racial prejudice, which was reflected in Wilson’s support for segregation, was so fervent that it would trigger a chain of events that produced the intellectual cradle of the Chinese Communist Party.
Peace and Prejudice
After Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese reciprocated feelings of nonwhite solidarity among African Americans and, by the end of World War I, had established ties with prominent leaders in African American communities. In fact, as the Japanese delegation traveled through New York to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, they met with esteemed leaders in the struggle for civil rights, including Ida B. Wells, Monroe Trotter, Madame C.J. Walker, and A. Philip Randolph. Expressing sympathy for those subject to racial prejudice around the world, Japan advanced a Racial Equality Proposal to be appended to the Treaty of Versailles. Although the feeble proposal did not affirm domestic racial equality, it was nonetheless met with great enthusiasm among African American news media and rights activists. Even those skeptical of Japanese imperialism, such as James Weldon Johnson, described the proposal as “perhaps the greatest hope for the colored race of the world.”
However, such enthusiasm was short-lived. Although the Racial Equality Proposal received a majority of votes from conference participants, President Wilson contravened the democratic process and effectively overturned it.
Historians have debated a number of theories behind Wilson’s rejection of the proposal, many of which reveal that the issue of racial equality was, in the words of historian Reginald Kearney, a “point which Wilson, given his Southern predilections, could hardly father.” Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan notes that President Wilson urged the Japanese to drop the amendment, realizing “that any reference to racial equality would alienate key politicians on the West Coast, and he needed their votes to get the League [of Nations] through Congress.” Another key advisor to President Wilson at the conference, Colonel Edward House, also expressed this concern that American support for the proposal “would raise the race issue throughout the world.” And, although historian Naoko Shimazu argues that President Wilson’s decision was more a consequence of realpolitik than racial prejudice against Japanese and African Americans, her analysis nonetheless demonstrates that President Wilson was influenced by the vehement, white supremacist objections of the British and Australian delegations.
In any case, President Wilson’s decision left Japan bitter, humiliated, and disillusioned. It was at this moment that Western commitment to racial inequality forever touched China’s modern political development. Appeasing Japan by granting its claim to German colonial possessions on China’s Shandong Peninsula, the Treaty of Versailles triggered sharp national outrage in China which precipitated the May Fourth Movement— the historical origin of the Chinese Communist Party.
Beyond May Fourth
The intersection between the May Fourth Movement and Western racial prejudice provides an interesting point of reflection on Matthew Pottinger’s remarks about the movement’s democratic ideals. Pottinger is correct that democratic principles emerged out of the May Fourth Movement, but so too did the ideological foundations of Chinese communism. In fact, two of the most prominent May Fourth intellectuals, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, were co-founders of the Chinese Communist Party. And, although it would be imprudent to ascribe any causal relationship between American racial prejudice and the foundations of the Chinese communism, it is evident that racial prejudice played a prominent role in producing the conditions for the May Fourth Movement to take place. Furthermore, Chinese disillusionment with Western liberalism unequivocally created the foundations for solidarity with African Americans engaged in the struggle for racial equality.
By the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, a whole “pantheon of black radicals in America,” in the words of Stanford historian Gordon H. Chang, “came to believe that their liberation was inextricably connected to China’s destiny.” In 1955, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai championed decolonization and racial equality at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Advocating for a “new democratic revolution,” Mao included a special place for African nations and nonwhite peoples of the world in the struggle for anti-imperialism. Although the United States refused to send a delegation, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African American to represent New York in Congress, traveled to Bandung and was profoundly influenced by the conference’s vision of racial equality. Other notable observants included Richard Wright, a celebrated black novelist who published a book on the conference shortly after, and Ethel L. Payne, the “First Lady of the Black Press.” Just as African Americans sought to advance the issue of racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference, so too did they express support for racial equality at Bandung when the U.S. would not.
In the years following Bandung, Mao further sympathized with the plight of African Americans within his broader anti-imperial struggle. In 1959, Mao personally invited Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, to China. Maoist China left a deep impression on Du Bois, who had become increasingly disillusioned with the failure of American democracy since his last visit to China in the 1930s. In a speech at Peking University, Du Bois praised Afro-Chinese solidarity and criticized the failure of American democratic progress to secure racial equality. “Beware Africa,” Du Bois warned, “America bargains for your soul. America would have you believe that they freed your grandchildren; that Afro-Americans are full American citizens, treated like equals, paid fair wages as workers, promoted for desert and free to learn and travel across the world.” “This is not true,” Du Bois continued, “Some are near freedom; some approach equality with whites; some have achieved education; but the price for this has too often been slavery of mind, distortion of truth and oppression of our own people.”
Du Bois was not alone in his disillusionment with the failure of American democratic progress. As Chang describes, activists such as Malcom X, Elaine Brown, Robert F. Williams, and Huey Newton were also inspired by Mao’s anti-imperial, socialist vision and were impressed by the improvement of Chinese livelihood since the establishment of the People’s Republic. In fact, Malcom X even began to learn Chinese, which he considered the “most powerful political language.” Asked by Williams in 1963 to offer a statement in support of black Americans struggling for racial equality, Mao expressed China’s “resolute support for the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination and for freedom and equal rights.” Mao further stated that the “fascist atrocities of the U.S. imperialists against the Negro people have exposed the true nature of so-called American democracy and freedom…”
Though historians continue to analyze the complex intersections between race and class that motivated Mao’s sympathies, feelings of solidarity between African Americans and Chinese did wane. Evidence suggests that Chinese overtures towards Africa and African Americans were primarily strategic as opposed to the product of racial solidarity, and though Maoist ideology deeply influenced black radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s, the revolutionary principles of Maoism largely passed with Mao himself in 1976. In the decades following Mao’s death, deep racial prejudice towards black people among Chinese also became increasingly apparent, as demonstrated by the 1988 Nanjing Anti-African Protests, all of this against the backdrop of China’s broader history of anti-blackness. However, this reality does not obviate or absolve criticisms of United States racial prejudice. In this regard, resonances of Mao’s critiques can still be found in Chinese discourses on democracy today.
Pottinger, Race, and the Future of US-China Relations
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and national protest, there is renewed attention in China on the issue of American racism and police brutality. Shen Dingli, an influential America-watcher at Fudan University, compared the protests following George Floyd’s death to those after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and traced America’s systemic racism to the legacy of slavery. Hu Xijin, Global Times editor and Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, published a blogpost ridiculing the prejudice of United States “democracy,” and American hypocrisy on the question of police brutality. Another article in the Beijing Youth Daily criticized “America’s Two Faces”: one which represents the white American Dream and one which reflects the 400-year “knees on their necks” repression of African Americans. Equating U.S. foreign policy towards China to George Floyd’s murder, Hua Chunying, spokeswoman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, recently tweeted that the U.S. was “attempting to kneel on and choke China.” To those in China watching protests unfold, racial prejudice and police brutality represent a stunning indictment of the democratic system which claims to hold human rights so dearly.
Furthermore, to many Chinese who watched the widespread protests in American cities, the U.S. condemnation of police brutality toward demonstrators in Hong Kong last year, in addition to American speculation about Beijing sending troops to quell the uprising, now appear to be nothing but an ugly exercise of double standards. It is precisely the circumstances of African Americans today— widespread economic discrimination, health disparities, voter suppression, mass incarceration, police brutality, along with the militarized response to Black Lives Matter protests— that make Pottinger’s appeal to Chinese democracy and respect for human rights ring so hollow. From the abolition of slavery in 1865 to the May Fourth Movement in 1919, anti-blackness has contoured the circumstances by which the very notions of Chinese democracy and communism emerged. Whether at the Paris Peace Conference in France or the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, African Americans leaders had little choice but to defend racial equality on the international stage when the United States would not. And, for many others, the prospect of democracy in the United States was so bleak that black inspiration came from other powers, such as imperial Japan or Maoist China.
The conclusion of Pottinger’s thought-provoking speech asked, “So who embodies the May Fourth spirit in China today?” To Pottinger, it is “civic-minded citizens who commit small acts of bravery,” such as Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist who warned his colleagues about a dangerous virus before being censored, threatened with prosecution, and succumbing to the illness himself. To those seeking to rise to the China challenge, whether by competition or cooperation, it should include those brave individuals who speak out against racism in the United States. The black leaders and activists in this article certainly embodied such bravery. Ida B. Wells, Monroe Trotter, Madame C.J. Walker, and A. Philip Randolph lobbied Japan and President Wilson to address the issue of racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference. Representative Powell, Jr. traveled to Bandung despite discouragement from the State Department and the risk to his career. Du Bois traveled to China in his global exploration for democracy despite a federal ban on his travel. Today, protestors for Black Lives Matter, who are speaking out against the murder of George Floyd among others who have lost their lives to police brutality, also embody such principles of democracy and respect for human rights.
It is consequently untenable for the United States to rise to the China challenge by championing democratic ideals without addressing its own democratic crisis. For many years, China has rebuffed criticism of its human rights record by pointing to police brutality and racial prejudice against African Americans. Every year, China’s annual report on U.S. human rights violations lists discrimination against African Americans. To China, this reality makes the State Department’s annual report of human rights violations in other countries, particularly in China, an act of disingenuous political strategy. And now, the militaristic and brutal police response to the #BlackLivesMatter protests have given Beijing further cover for police brutality in Hong Kong and the mass incarceration of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. As a result, when China-watchers and policymakers look back on Pottinger’s May Fourth speech, they should ponder not only China’s contemporary regime, but also whether the United States is fulfilling its role as the ‘lighthouse of democracy.’ Pottinger’s question about the May Fourth Movement applies equally to America’s struggle against structural racism: “Will the movement’s democratic aspirations remain unfulfilled for another century?”
Yawei Liu, Ph.D. is the director of The Carter Center’s China Program and an adjunct professor of Political Science at Emory University. Dr. Liu has written extensively on China’s political developments and grassroots democracy and has been a member of numerous Carter Center missions to monitor Chinese village, township, and county people’s congress deputy elections since 1997. You can follow him on Twitter @Chinaelections.
Michael B. Cerny graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Emory University with a B.A. in Political Science, and a double major in Chinese Studies. He co-founded the Emory Journal of Asian Studies and previously interned with The Carter Center’s China Program. His articles have been published in the U.S.-China Perception Monitor, The Diplomat, and on SupChina.com. You can follow him on Twitter @michaelbcerny.