Decolonization Is Not a Dinner Party: Claudia Jones, China's Nuclear Weapons, and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jinte.3.1.0021
• Pages: 21-45
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Author: Zifeng Liu
• Subject Matter: Black women's internationalism; nuclear weapons,Sino-Soviet Split,anticolonialism and anti-imperialism,national self-determination

The Journal of Intersectionality

21Volume Three, Number One

Decolonizaon Is Not a Dinner Party: Claudia Jones,

China’s Nuclear Weapons, and An-Imperialist Solidarity

Zifeng Liu1

Doctoral Candidate, Africana Studies and Research Center

Cornell University

Abstract: This article examines Claudia Jones’s view on nuclear weapons and her attempts in the West

Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and Renmin Ribao to link Beijing’s nuclear project to global

anti-imperialist and nationalist movements. In hailing China’s rst successful nuclear test as a major

advancement in the international struggle against U.S. empire, Jones underscored the overlaps between

her internationalist politics and Beijing’s militant foreign policy pronouncements to drive home the

need for intensied resistance against imperialism and for national liberation. In this way she also re-

jected the Soviet doctrine of peaceful coexistence and articulated a peace politics that emphasized the

dismantling of imperialism and colonialism as the prerequisite for lasting peace. Her journalistic eorts

to wage a global decolonial struggle culminated in her reporting on her 1964 visit to China, where she

found “evidence” for Beijing’s anti-imperialist commitments. Although she constructed romanticizing,

if not entirely counterfactual, narratives of Chinese socialism that corresponded to the party-state’s

geopolitical and domestic aspirations, she downplayed the implications of the deepening Sino-Soviet

Split, thereby formulating a relatively independent position that diered from Beijing’s line. Jones’s ac-

tivism around the issue of nuclear weapons, as well as its inconsistencies and contradictions, exemplied

the hard work that Black internationalists had to put into forging transnational solidarities and tilting

the global geopolitical balance in the favor of the decolonizing world.

Keywords: Black women’s internationalism; nuclear weapons; Sino-Soviet Split; anticolonialism and

anti-imperialism; national self-determination

1 Zifeng Liu is a doctoral candidate in Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center, where he

is completing a dissertation entitled “Redrawing the Balance of Power: Black Radical Women, China, and

the Making of a Political Imaginary, 1949-1978.”

The teachings of the Chairman

Of the Chinese Communists

The tactic of unity, with all who

Loved this ancient land

The service to the people’s needs

The ght to win and

Change the mind of Man

Against the corruption of centuries,

Of feudal-bourgeois, capitalist ideas

The fusion of courage and clarity

Of polemic against misleaders

Who sought compromise with the enemy

These were the pre-requisites of Victory.

No idle dreamers these —

and yet they dared to dream

The dream — long-planned

Unfolds in Socialist China.

— Claudia Jones, “Yenan — Cradle of

the Revolution” (Revised as “Thoughts

on Visiting Yenan”)

22 Volume Three, Number One

Liu — “Decolonization is Not a Dinner Party”

In 1964, Black Communist Claudia Jones (1915-1964) traveled to China. During her return

trip from Yenan (Yan’an), the former capital of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a

revolutionary center, Jones organized her reections on the Chinese Revolution into a poem

that hails China’s socialist construction as a harbinger of global emancipation. Studying the

history of China’s struggle for liberation and witnessing profound socio-politico-economic

transformations in the edgling People’s Republic restored her faith in the possibilities of similar

socialist revolutions elsewhere.2 Born in Trinidad and raised in Harlem, Jones was always on the

front lines of global crusades against interlocking oppressive systems of race, gender, class, and

nation, and sought to forge seemingly disparate liberation struggles into a worldwide coalition

against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Germane to this multifaceted internationalist

politics was an anti-imperialist political imaginary that emphasized, as a requisite for global

emancipation, the conjoining of the anticolonial, antiracist, and antisexist movements in the

Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the construction of socialist modernity in China.

Although traveling to China decisively solidied Claudia Jones’s pro-Maoist stance, she

had sided with the CCP, endorsed and defended China’s domestic and foreign policies, and

linked the Black radical intellectual tradition to Chinese socialism before she made the trip.

While based in the U.S., in her writing and public speaking, Jones consistently repudiated the

country’s imperialism as occasioning racial, class, and gender oppression within its borders

and simultaneous unrelenting aggression against the decolonizing world, and had suggested

that it was shared historical and contemporaneous experiences of oppression and struggle that

generated a sense of shared fate among anti-imperialist and anticolonial nations. Albeit only

occasionally, she enthused about the rising status of Chinese women, which, for her, concretely

demonstrated the promise of gender liberation that socialism held, and urged U.S. women to

join forces with their Asian sisters to advance global peace and security.3 She listed China as one

crucial participant in a Soviet-led global revolutionary movement. Likewise, before she left the

U.S., the Chinese reading public had known her as “a Communist Party, U.S.A. leader” and

“renowned Black American leader.”4 Amidst a rising tide of anti-communist paranoia in the

1950s, for instance, Chinese newspaper coverage of Jones’s imprisonment, criminalization, and

deportation represented her as a dauntless warrior, willing to sacrice her life for the cause of

the downtrodden the world over.5 Notwithstanding those initial and sporadic discursive attempts

to build solidarity, the near decade following her arrival in Britain in 1955 witnessed Jones’s

redoubled eorts to tilt the global geopolitical balance in the favor of the decolonizing world.

And the period between the founding of the West Indian Gazette in 1958 and her untimely death

in 1964 was the high point of Jones’s engagement with China. Apprised of the shifting domestic

and international contexts, Jones refashioned herself as a Third World revolutionary and elevated

Mao’s China as a leader in the global struggle against imperialism and white supremacy. Indeed,

as Carole Boyce Davies observes, Jones’s political activism in London indicated a reorientation

away from a Soviet communist party line toward Pan-African and Third World emancipatory

2 Jones 1965; Boyce Davies 2011: 32n229.

3 Jones 1951.

4 New China News Agency (hereafter NCNA) 1955 (1); NCNA 1955 (2).

5 NCNA 1948; NCNA 1955 (2); Zhou 1959.