This book explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War—journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China's modern popular culture and politics. Gao reveals earlier and more widespread interactions between Chinese and African American leftists than accounts of the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist Chinese would have us believe. The book's multilingual approach draws from massive yet rarely used archival streams in China and in Chinatowns and elsewhere in the United States. These materials allow Gao to retell the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies.

Sporting Gender is the first book to explore the rise to fame of female athletes in China during its national crisis of 1931-45 brought on by the Japanese invasion. By re-mapping lives and careers of these athletes, administrators, and film actors within a wartime context, Gao shows how they coped with the conflicting demands of nationalist causes, unwanted male attention, and modern fame. Addressing themes of state control, media influence, fashion, and changing gender roles, she argues that the athletic female form helped to create a new ideal of modern womanhood in China at a time when women’s emancipation and national needs went hand in hand. This book brings vividly to life the histories of these athletes and demonstrates how intertwined they were with the aims of the state and the needs of society.

The surprising story of how Cold War foes found common cause in transforming China’s economy into a source of cheap labor, creating the economic interdependence that characterizes our world today. For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganization was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians. Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.

The Cold War conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China did not only encompass political, military, diplomatic, and economic clashes. The two powers also confronted each other on the cultural front. Despite a long history of extensive and mostly constructive cultural interactions, the two nations cut off existing ties in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and established new relationships aimed at attacking and isolating each other. Even after Beijing and Washington permitted cultural exchange as part of their effort to normalize diplomatic relations in the 1970s, the weaponization of cultural interactions continued. Hongshan Li provides a groundbreaking account of the confrontation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China on the Cold War’s cultural front. He investigates the origins, evolution, and significance of the role of cultural interactions in the shifting relations between the United States and the PRC from the late 1940s through the late 1970s. Li demonstrates that the drastic transformation of U.S.-China cultural interactions not only altered the course of Sino-American cultural relations but also shaped the Cold War experience of the two peoples. Fighting on the Cultural Front examines topics such as competition and conflicts over Chinese students and scholars stranded in the United States, maneuvers on the authorization of journalistic exchanges, the establishment of Taiwan as a cultural bastion, and Beijing’s promotion of its revolutionary ideology through individual U.S. citizens, particularly African Americans. This important book offers a new lens on the history of U.S.-China relations and the cultural side of the global Cold War.

Road to Confrontation: American Policy toward China and Korea

A groundbreaking collection of photographs and essays that shed new light on the history of Black America, from the Picturing Black History project. “An astonishing work." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Picturing Black History uncovers untold stories and rarely seen images of the Black experience, providing new context around culturally significant moments. This beautiful collectible volume makes a thoughtful gift and is full of rousing, vibrant essays paired with rarely seen photographs that expand our understanding of Black history. The book is a collaborative effort between Getty Images, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, and the History departments at The Ohio State and Miami Universities. It informs, educates, and inspires our current moment by exploring the past, blending the breadth and depth of Getty Images’s archives with the renowned expertise of Origins contributors and The Ohio State’s and Miami’s History departments, including Daniela Edmeier, Damarius Johnson, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Steve Conn. Created by a growing collective of professional historians, art historians, Black Studies scholars, and photographers and showcasing Getty Images’s unmatched collection of photographs, Picturing Black History embraces the power of visual storytelling to relay little-known stories of oppression and resistance, perseverance and resilience, freedom, dreams, imagination, and joy within the United States and around the world. In collecting these new photographic essays, this book furthers an ongoing dialogue on the significance of Black history and Black life, sharing new perspectives on the current status of prejudice and discrimination bias with a wider audience. Picturing Black History uses the latest academic learning and scholarship to recontextualize and dispel prejudices, while uncovering, digitizing, and preserving new archival materials to amplify a more inclusive visual landscape. "Picturing Black History offers a trove of both famous and unseen photos with brief, poignant accompanying essays to show not only the centrality of Black people to American history but also how African Americans used the photographer’s lens to tell their own stories. The editors, authors, and Getty images have created a beautiful book that stands on its own as a work of art, a veritable museum in print.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University