by Gerald Horne, Anthony Ballas, Aspen Ballas, and PM Irvin

In September 2024, as a response to the profound summit between the People’s Republic of China and over four dozen heads of state and government from Africa taking place in Beijing, Kamala Harris’s plane touched down in East Africa. What is often overlooked about this curious confluence of events is the irony that on each and every leg of her journey, from Ghana to Zambia to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Harris’s plane landed in an airport that was either designed or constructed by Chinese interests. Had Harris decided to extend her stay on the continent and visit Angola, Uganda, Namibia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, or the Republic of Congo, she would have encountered much of the same. Or, if the former vice president had decided to travel by rail, she and her entourage from Washington would have encountered various transportation projects such as the trains from Mombasa to Nairobi, Kenya and from Ethiopia to Djibouti, among others—infrastructures which also bear China’s fingerprints. 

This curious fact is indicative not only of the importance of China to African development, but also of the role that China has played more broadly to fill the infrastructural vacuum left in the wake of Euro-American colonial and neo-colonial underdevelopment of the continent. With no scarcity of irony, this fact also reveals the reality that U.S. imperialism may be quickly losing altitude, forced to cede dominance due to China’s meteoric rise as well as the contradictions that fomented the present crisis of U.S. imperialism. While it ought to be clear that the People’s Republic of China is poised to replace the United States as the dominant economic force on planet Earth, evinced not least by strides in green energy technologies, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and alike, what is perhaps less clear are the historical forces which propelled China’s rise in the first instance, and the latter’s impact on the current crisis of U.S. imperialism. 

During the early years of the Cold War, and as a sequel to the Red Summer and the Palmer raids following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the United States was again gripped by Red Scare hysteria. In tandem with the effects following the confrontation between Chinese and American forces on the Korean peninsula between 1950 and 1953, Washington pushed for a total ban on cultural exchanges and monetary transfers with China, while also barring U.S. citizens from traveling to the People’s Republic. Although these particular restrictions were relatively short-lived, they were nonetheless of great consequence, especially for the hundreds of Chinese-Americans who were seized, arrested, deported, imprisoned, and who suffered loss of employment as the result of U.S.-style anti-communist and anti-Chinese fervor at midcentury. However, neither were the travel ban nor the subsequent persecutions historically unprecedented—far from it. By the 1950s, various anti-Chinese policies had already been passed and put into practice in preceding decades, including, inter alia, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was in effect for over 60 years until 1943, as well as the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924, both of which were consequential for people of Chinese descent. 

After the years of compounding anti-communism and enforced anti-labor legal machinations which lead to the repression and persecution of such luminaries as various as Paul Robeson, William L. Patterson, Benjamin Davis Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, and alleged fellow travelers alike, tensions with China were mounting.¹ By the early 1950s, however, Washington’s barring of American citizens from traveling to China would have had little effect on W.E.B. Du Bois, for instance, against whom anti-Communist forces in Washington had already imposed a targeted travel ban, revoking his passport under the specious charges that he was working as the agent of a foreign government—namely, Moscow.² For Du Bois, already well acquainted with the events of October 1949, the Chinese Revolution caused such a rupture in the imperialist world order that “the moon fell out of the heaven of Big Business,” dealing a mighty blow against global white supremacy.³ Prior to 1949, China was a semi-colonial nation that consisted of a fifth of the world’s population, and it was long subjected to white European colonial domination.⁴ Viewing China as “the end and aim of all imperial planning, from America to Japan,” Du Bois lauded the Chinese Revolution all the more.⁵

The feeling was mutual: as a response to Washington’s revocation of Du Bois’s passport, China protested, evinced by an outpouring of “letters of support,” with Shanghai’s China News “join[ing] media worldwide in publishing supportive articles,” while the People’s Daily “proclaimed that people around the globe, including citizens of the Soviet Union and China, protested ‘this baseless behavior of the U.S. government.’”⁶ After Washington’s travel ban was lifted and Du Bois’s passport restored, the eminent nonagenarian sociologist, along with Shirley Graham Du Bois, traveled to China in 1959 to meet with Mao Zedong and other Chinese officials. In the same year, Du Bois would celebrate the Chinese Revolution once again in “I Sing to China,” a poem which emphatically urged China to partner with Africans in the struggle against global imperialism and white supremacy.⁷ 1959 also saw the fruits of Du Bois’s internationalism as translations of his books John Brown and The Souls of Black Folk were published in Beijing, marking a significant achievement in African American and Chinese relations, given their shared histories as the victims of atrocity and humiliation executed at the hands of colonial and fascist forces in the United States and Europe.⁸ 

The “century of humiliation” endured by China which came to a screeching halt in October 1949 was fueled in no small measure by what we might refer to as the centuries of humiliation endured by peoples of African descent at the hands and at the behest of the unlamented African slave trade perpetrated by what amounts today to the North Atlantic powers. Although it is no mystery that the wealth that fueled the rise of Great Britan and the United States, as well as France and Spain, was driven in no small measure by the African slave trade, the confluence of globalized, extraterritorial anti-Blackness⁹ and anti-Chinese hysteria is not often mentioned in this context. For instance, the series of anti-Chinese pogroms in the late 19th century, from Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tacoma, Rock Springs, and Seattle to the curiously named Chinese Massacre Cove in Oregon, which saw the murder of thirty-four Chinese workers in 1887, overlapped in time with the period in which Black people were en route to being denaturalized, numerous anti-Black pogroms were taking place in Dixie, and white supremacist terrorism, headed by the Ku Klux Klan, was on the rise. Also witnessed in this period was the end of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, held at ransom by the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, and the coup to oust Queen Liliuokalani that followed in 1893.¹⁰ Collectively, these events resulted in voter repression laws that enabled only those with European ancestry to vote, ensnaring descendants of African and Chinese people in the machinations of repressive liberalism that greatly affected the lives of Chinese workers and African workers alike. Through these maneuvers and others, the sons and daughters of missionaries established what amounted to an apartheid regime in the Pacific, harmful to those of African and Chinese ancestry.

It is no coincidence, thus, that the events of October 1949 witnessed a turning point in world history for peoples of African descent, and the wave of anti-colonial and national liberation movements which flowed from the end of World War II. Neither is it coincidental that the events of 1949 provided inspiration and assistance to the embattled workers’ movements in the United States, as well as the Civil Rights movement, culminating in the erosion of some of the more egregious aspects of Jim Crow, which reflects a certain confluence as well between the events of October 1949 and the retreat from the agonizing horrors of U.S. Apartheid. 

What this conjuncture reveals is the way U.S. imperialism responded to the perceived tripartite threat of the “Red Menace,” the “Black Bolshevik,” and the “Yellow peril” domestically and abroad. Not only is the history of this grotesque triptych vital for understanding the period of the Cold War at midcentury, but indeed, the contradictions of U.S. imperialism generated throughout this period have proven to be consequential in our present era of Cold War 2.0¹¹ as U.S. imperialism once again renews and recalibrates its political and economic standoff with the People’s Republic of China. In order to understand the current iteration of this renewed Cold War (perhaps more aptly dubbed a “Hot Peace”) and the current crisis of Western imperialism, as well as the impact of China’s meteoric economic and technological ascension post-October 1949 on the latter, it is vital to understand the role that China played for African Americans during the consequential post-World War II era.

Although Washington has faced great difficulty convincing not only African Americans, but any progressive forces in the United States and in the international community writ large, that the U.S. is, as it claims, a “paragon of human rights,”¹² few seek to understand how the United States encouraged economic and technological growth in China, arguably participating directly in the ascension of the global juggernaut we see today. Leonard Woodcock, former president of the United Auto Workers and U.S. ambassador to China urged Washington to temper relations with the People’s Republic of China in the late 1970s. Woodcock’s efforts included calls to cease supplying Taipei and Beijing with arms as part of the process to normalize relations¹³ while also opening up and maintaining trade between the U.S. and China.¹⁴ What often goes unremarked is Woodcock’s strategy to engage in the transfer of technology with Beijing in lieu of direct arms sales; unbeknownst to the U.S. at the time, and what has often gone unacknowledged in the decades hence, is the way that the United States assisted and encouraged the rise of China through direct foreign investment and technology transfer, which China utilized in their broader efforts to fill the infrastructural vacuum left in the wake of Euro-American colonial and neo-colonial underdevelopment in the Global South.

While U.S. imperialism desperately seeks to turn back the hands of time, longing for a prelapsarian return to before Deng Xiaoping’s sojourn to the United States in 1978, or before Richard Nixon’s conference with Mao Zedong in 1972, or perhaps further still, to a time prior to the fateful events of October 1949 that saw the triumph of the Chinese Revolution, there will be great difficulty redeeming U.S. imperialism and the North Atlantic bloc more generally, which got fat and happy on the plundering of Africa without leaving behind much infrastructure. And this is precisely where China’s influence and role in the region has been paramount. The various Belt and Road projects on the continent have provided a counterweight against French imperialism, which has historically been the major bloodsucker on the continent, and against British imperialism, which explains the pro-Soviet stance of Africa during the Cold War, which is now manifesting in the PRC’s recent reluctance to sanction Russia and the expulsion of French mining from the Sahel, among other intersecting phenomena. 

The fervor directed at Cuba, for instance, by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and by Senator Marco Rubio, another son of a Cuban expat, is part of this same anti-communist and anti-China constellation. In early 2025, Rubio viciously promised the expulsion of 6,000 Chinese students from U.S. universities,¹⁵ only for President Donald Trump to pull a dramatic about-face just months later, instead promising to allow 600,000 Chinese students into the U.S. out of fear of  U.S. universities facing economic difficulties otherwise. Trump’s characteristically vulgar admission that the “schools would go to hell”¹⁶ is a stunning, and telling, riposte to not only his own administration’s previous policies regarding Chinese student visas, but the long-standing, bipartisan hostilities against the PRC out of Washington. This fact is indicative of the China-centric swerve that is currently taking place, unprecedented even in the annals of Western hegemony, with similar signals, too numerous to mention, abounding at every level of U.S. politics.

One need only take a perfunctory glance at the emergent powerhouse hailing from the Global South as economic trading partners composing the BRICS nations ascend at breakneck speed and at global scale, challenging the hegemony of the U.S. dollar, while portending a process of de-dollarization which may well be imminent. Although this ascendant economic coalition should not come as a surprise to astute analysts and historians of U.S. imperialism, there remains nonetheless archaic bipartisan efforts to foment anti-China hysteria. Indeed, few issues unite the two major bourgeois parties in the United States than kneejerk hostility to Beijing. This position is reflected in the fact that the notorious Central Intelligence Agency has an entire Center devoted solely to undermining Beijing, which is quite unusual, by the bipartisan resolution “denouncing the horrors of socialism” in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023,¹⁷ as well as by Nancy Pelosi’s bizarre pageantry in 2022 when she flew across the Pacific to Taipei.¹⁸ These strange paroxysms of a flagging U.S. imperial order ought also give us pause, and ask us to consider how these and other ideological shows of force directed at the PRC appear actually as dramatic signs of decline and imperial weakness in retrospect. Only weeks after Pelosi’s peculiar U.S. foreign policy sideshow, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken was forced to retreat with his tail between his legs and publicly profess the United States’s commitment to its long-standing One China policy.¹⁹ This particular retreat exposes a fissure in Washington’s ideological edifice, revealing how vapid and ineffectual its various anti-China strategies truly are. 

Such fissures appear to quickly be turning into gaping wounds, indicative of U.S. imperial overreach, which, as of 2025, is exemplified not least by the Trump regime’s attempts at exacting punitive tariffs against China and its trading partners around the globe. However, bulwarked by the rise of the BRICS nations, and complemented by the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, China appears likely to parry Trump’s attempts at a trade war. As one U.S. analyst put it, China maintains “escalatory dominance” over the United States, rendering Washington’s leverage against the PRC nonexistent. The recent dumping of U.S. treasury bonds held by China have only made Washington’s efforts all the more futile; as one China Daily commentator put it, China’s bulwarking of the U.S. economy by purchasing treasury bills suggests that the U.S. “is increasingly dependent on surplus foreign savings to fill the void”²⁰ in its own coffers, which has increased dramatically during the second iteration of the Trump administration, making the dumping of these bills all the more consequential for U.S. imperialism. In a similar vein, we might also look to China’s ban on cryptocurrency, and the shuttering of coal-powered digital currency “mining” operations as blows against new forms of fictitious capital currently vying for financial and commercial purchase in the West, whilst public and private institutions²¹ in the United States have come to rely on digital currencies as ill-fated and perhaps even fantastical attempts to decelerate the decline of their economic dominance. 

We can also interpret Trump’s stated desire in early 2025 to eventually rid the U.S. of income tax altogether and implement his tariff regime on the rest of the world as signs that the curtain may be closing on U.S. imperialism: not only has Trump’s tariff regime faced an uphill battle domestically in the federal courts, but has faced stiff competition at a global scale, and even caused economic whiplash for the United States, resulting in a flailing U.S. empire seeking to expand its borders in a Monroe Doctrine-style effort by once again seeking to annex Canada and vying for control of Greenland via surreptitious means. Likewise, we might look to renewed aggression with China’s trading partner, Venezuela, as part of the broader effort to deport Venezuelan migrants from the United States while also sending Naval ships to the coasts of Latin America, and placing a $50 million bounty on the head of President Nicolas Maduro.²² Given this kind of gunboat diplomacy²³—and especially in the context of Trump’s recent proposal to rename the Pentagon the “Ministry of War”²⁴—it is evident that, like an animal lashing out after being backed into a corner, the Trump regime is signalling that the U.S. imperialist project may be in a steep and ignominious decline that shows no signs of abating.

Like one scene in a film cross-dissolving into another, we are currently witnessing the transition into a new global correlation of forces, with Beijing and the 100 million-strong membership of the CPC in the director’s chair.²⁵ The rise of China may well bring the curtain down on a half-century if not more of Western hegemony, forcing the West to take a back seat and become an economic minority.²⁶ The prospect of this emergent reality is causing equal parts delirium and panic within the Trump regime in Washington,, indicated not least by its flailing and vacillating foreign policy initiatives. This panic, sown by China’s meteoric rise, will soon be reaped by Western European nations and the North Atlantic bloc as well; China’s refusal to capitulate to the aging Western hegemon’s attempts to pressure the PRC and provoke a rebuke of Moscow allowed for even greater expansion of the China-Russia relationship following the Shanghai Cooperative Summit in 2022.²⁷ If the warming relations between India and China are any indication, then a similar process may already be underway there in late 2025; as the result of the Trump administration enforcing its capricious tariff regime on India, Prime Minister Modi met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in New Delhi and with President Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2025, exposing a weakening U.S. imperialism if not a full-blown imperial crisis altogether. 

Just as the Alaska summit between President Putin and Trump in August 2025 may well signal a Moscow-centric drift away from the North Atlantic bloc, so too the attendance of President Xi in Red Square in commemoration of the 80-year anniversary of victory over fascism suggests the possibility of a similar realignment of global forces. If this so-called “Asian Pivot” is any indication, then, along with the role that China has played in the Caribbean and in Africa, as we go forward in this century we should continue to salute Beijing and in particular its assistance to socialist Cuba, as this aid, among other factors, is indicative of a brighter future for the bulk of humanity. 

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¹See Horne, Gerald, Black Liberation / Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party, (University of Delaware Press, 1994); Burden-Stelly, Charisse, Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorising Capitalist Racism in the United States, (University of Chicago Press, 2023). 

²See Horne, Gerald, Black & Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War 1944-1963, (SUNY Press, 1986).

³Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. “A History of the Last Forty Years,” March 31, 1958. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, 10.

⁴On Du Bois’ analysis of China, particularly its history as a semi-colony of Western imperialism, see Li, Dai, “Du Bois’s Intellectual and Political Significance for China,” in The Oxford Handbook of W. E. B. Du Bois, Oxford Handbooks, Morris, Aldon D., and others (eds), (2025; online edn, Oxford Academic, May 19, 2022); Gao Yunxiang, Arise, Africa! Roar, China! Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century. University of North Carolina Press, (Chapel Hill, 2021); and Yunxiang Gao, “W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10, no. 1: 59–85.

⁵Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. Russia and America: An Interpretation, 1950. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, 133.

⁶Gao Yunxiang, Arise, Africa! Roar, China!, 35.

⁷Du Bois, “I Sing to China: Dedicated to Kuo Mo-Jo, May 1, 1959,” in Creative Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois: A Pageant, Poems, Short Stories, and Playlets. Ed. Herbert Aptheker. White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1985. 47-51; see also Chiu, Jeannie, “Imaginary Neighbors: African American and Asian American Writers’ Visions of China During the Cold War” (2008). Global Asia Journal. 2, 2008.

⁸See Li, Hongshan, “Building a Black Bridge: China’s Interaction with African-American Activists during the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 20, Number 3, Summer 2018, 123; as well as Yunxiang Gao, “W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois in Maoist China,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10, no. 1: 59–85.

⁹Horne, Gerald, The Capital of Slavery: Washington D.C., 1800-1865, (International Publishers, 2025), 55. 

¹⁰See Horne, Gerald. The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South China Seas after the Civil War, (University of Hawa’ii Press, 2007). 

¹¹“Why Does Xi Keep Purging Loyalists? Look to Stalin and Mao for the Answer,” The New York Times, August 20, 202

¹²“US guilty of myriad human rights abuses,” China Daily, May 30, 2024. https://epaper.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202405/30/WS6657b6fea310df4030f51e75.html. 

¹³“A Labor Voice Urges China Trade,” Washington Post, March 7, 2000. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/03/08/a-labor-voice-urges-china-trade/9464a4b2-8fd4-4d67-aa31-0dd59b3c0f6e/.

¹⁴Walte, Juan J.,“Leonard Woodcock, former American ambassador to China, told a…,” United Press International (archives), May 28, 1981. See also “Memorandum From the President’s Assistant For National Security Affairs (Brzezinski) to President Carter,” Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Far East, Oksenberg Subject File, Box 56, Policy Process: 1–4/78. Secret. Sent for action. The date is handwritten. At the top of the first page, Carter expressed his approval for the proposed studies (on Korea, China normalization, and arms sales to Taiwan) by writing, “First 3 studies ok—needed. J.” In the margin next to the paragraphs summarizing each of these topics, Carter wrote, “OK.,” April 18, 1978. 

¹⁵ “Marco Rubio: US to ‘aggressively’ revoke visas of Chinese students,” Politico, May 28, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/28/rubio-revoke-chinese-students-visas-00373835. 

¹⁶ “Trump saying 600,000 Chinese students could come to the US draws MAGA backlash,” AP, August 26, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/chinese-student-visas-trump-maga-dce4e064ea61a4df090865668ca48cde. 

¹⁷ “H.Con.Red.9: Denouncing the horrors of socialism,” GovTrackUS, February 2 2023. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/118-2023/h106.

¹⁸“Pelosi’s flight to Teipei took a circuitous route. Here’s why,” The New York Times, August 3, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/world/asia/pelosis-widely-watched-flight-to-taipei-took-a-circuitous-route-heres-why.

¹⁹Blinken, Anthony, “The Administration’s Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” May 26, 2022. https://2021-2025.state.gov/the-administrations-approach-to-the-peoples-republic-of-china/.

²⁰China Daily, March 23, 2006; Horne, Gerald, Blows Against The Empire. (International Publishers, 2008), 14.

²¹See, for instance, Ganea, Teddy, “UChicago Lost Money on Crypto, Then Froze Research When Federal Funding Was Cut,” The Stanford Review, March 19, 2025, https://stanfordreview.org/uchicago-lost-money-on-crypto-then-froze-research-when-federal-funding-was-cut/; and Golumbia, David, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, (U of Minnesota Press, 2016); and John, Alun, et al. “China’s Top Regulators Ban Crypto Trading and Mining, Sending Bitcoin Tumbling,” September 24, 2021, reuters.com/world/china/china-central-bank-vows-crackdown-cryptocurrency-trading-2021-09-24/.

²²The Trump regime’s refusal to negotiate with Brazil, another trading partner of the PRC, despite numerous entreaties on the part of President Lula da Silva, ought to remind us why the right wing coalition of international forces has erected ramparts against Latin American socialism. Trump has also called for the release of Jair Bolsonaro, currently on house arrest awaiting trial for his role in plotting the attempted overthrow of Lula da Silva in 2022 as a sequel to the attempted coup of January 6, 2021.

²³Philips, Tom, “Trump’s Venezuela gunboat diplomacy: sabre-rattling or prelude to invasion?” Guardian, August 29, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/29/venezuela-gunboat-diplomacy-trump-maduro/. 

²⁴Trump expressed a desire to rename the US Department of Defense to the “Ministry of War,” Известия, August 26, 2025; and “Trump pushes to rename Department of Defense to the ‘Department of War,’” Международная жизнь, August 26, 2025, https://en.interaffairs.ru/article/trump-pushes-to-rename-department-of-defense-the-department-of-war/.

²⁵“The CPC grows stronger as membership exceeds 100 million,” Beijing Review, July 7, 2025.

²⁶ Asia Times, January 28, 2006; Horne, Gerald, Blows Against The Empire, (International Publishers, 2008), 7. 

²⁷ “SCO summit did not show what you think it showed,” Asia Times, September 21, 2022. http://asiatimes.com/2022/09/sco-summit-did-not-show-what-you-think-it-showed/.

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Gerald Horne is the John J. and Rebecca Moors Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. 

Anthony Ballas is a PhD student in the Program for Literature at Duke University. 

Aspen Ballas is a PhD student and teaching fellow in English at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. 

PM Irvin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Stanford University.