African Americans in Global Affairs: Contemporary Perspectives

12: The Assault of the Monkey King on the Hosts of Heaven: The Black Freedom Struggle and China—The New Center of Revolution

TWELVE The Assault of the Monkey King on the Hosts of Heaven THE BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE AND CHINA— THE NEW CENTER OF REVOLUTION Robeson Taj P . Frazier In every town and city we went to the opera, and can never forget the assault of the Monkey King on the Hosts of Heaven, facing God and the angels. A night sleeping train took us over the -hour trip from Peking to Wuhan. There I saw the bridge that had been miraculously thrown across the Yangtze. —w. e. b. du bois, the autobiography of w. e. b. du bois (1959) We have been like the “Monkey King Upsetting Heaven” in the old play. We have thrown away the Heavenly Rule Book. Remember this. Never take a Heavenly Rule Book too seriously. One must always go by one’s own revolutionary rules. —mao zedong, (1964) In the Fall of 1949 the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) established the People’s Republic of China (prc), an act that challenged U.S. visionary globalism and shifted the Cold War to East Asian terrain. The ccp’s model of revolution blended communism and radical nationalism, a standpoint that presented a stark contrast to the bipolar new world order advocated by the United States and the Soviet Union. Ten years after the establishment of the prc, ninety-one-year-old scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois traveled to China and summed up the nation’s challenge to Western interests. Du Bois, in the epigraph that opens this chapter, referred to a classic Chinese fable, Journey to the West, and cast the Chinese as the tale’s protagonist, the Mon- 313 Transnational Activism & Globalization 314 key King, and the West as its adversary. He surmised that China’s “assault” on Western civilization signified a momentous shift in the logic and force behind Euro-American hegemony and the colonial and imperial crucible faced by people of the Third World. It is no coincidence that ccp leader Mao Zedong also made this same pronouncement throughout his reign. A good number of blacks in the United States shared Du Bois’s outlook and attraction to China. After World War II, more and more of them situated China as an important global force and Third World model that could assist them in the struggle against U.S. racial capitalism. Several publications have probed this little known history of black internationalism. These works relay that Mao and the ccp’s platform provided black radicals and internationalists with a useful lens to consider and view global relations , national development, modernization, and Third World socialism. Chinese communism offered an Asian example of revolution and development , and a useful and progressive reconceptualization of MarxismLeninism . While Soviet leaders V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin designated the Soviet Union as the vanguard leader of the world socialist revolution, Mao pointed to the Third World. Mao’s “Theory of the Three Worlds” argued that it was up to the colonized populations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas to “combat imperialism, colonialism and hegemonism.” Mao also moved away from the Soviet theory of “permanent revolution” and offered his own conceptualization of revolution, “the new democratic revolution,” which posited that it was not vital to have a stage of bourgeois capitalism before the emergence of socialism. Instead, Mao argued that a nationalist patriotic united front could defeat imperialism, spurring a national democratic revolution that would ultimately develop into a socialist revolution. Moreover, Mao asserted that it was not Marxism that fueled revolution; it was how revolutionaries cultivated and applied Marxism to their specific circumstances, histories, and localities that determined its impact on any revolution. Mao also insisted that the creativity of the most downtrodden populations best informed and cultivated a socialist revolution . Consequently, Mao celebrated China’s peasant masses, as opposed to the revolutionary intellectual vanguard or the working class, as the guiding social force of the Chinese Revolution. The peasants’ creativity, he pointed out, was what carried the revolution into the superstructure, that is, the national culture. Ultimately, these concepts displayed Mao’s ability to engage Marxism with nationalism and create what seemed like the possibility of a cultural movement and revolution that did not prioritize class over race and culture. Part of what historian Besenia Rodriguez terms the “tricontinental” 315 frazier ) Black Freedom Struggle & China spirit and political culture of the 1950s through 1970s, Chinese communism and Maoist thought supplied black activist intellectuals with a...