UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND 

 

 

 

 

Ideologies of Blackness and the translation of Black African 

literature in Maoist China: A paratextual exploration 

By 

Byron B. Sherman 

 

A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy in African Literature 

Student number:  9506132K 

Supervisors:  Prof. I. Hofmeyr 

Prof. L. Bethlehem 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Copyright by Byron Boaz Sherman, 2022 



 

 

I declare that this is my own unaided work. It is in the fulfilment of the 

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 

at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted 

for any other degree or examination or to any other university.  

 

Byron Boaz Sherman 

Date: 10 December 2021       

 

 



i 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my beloved mother 

Anne Sherman 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



ii 

 

Acknowledgements 

I am deeply grateful to my two supervisors, Isabel Hofmeyr and Louise 

Bethlehem, for their expert guidance, encouragement and compassion over the 

many years that this project required. I began corresponding with Prof. Hofmeyr 

as early as 2012 and she provided generous feedback on my ideas and 

suggestions even prior to my registration as a doctoral student. As a part-time 

student working in China, far away from the Wits community and the resources 

available to most postgraduate students, I faced a number of special challenges. 

Always cognizant of this, Prof. Hofmeyr did all she could to assist me, 

including arranging for me to stay on campus briefly during my 2018 winter 

holiday in South Africa — one of the happiest and most productive periods of 

my years as a doctoral student. Prof. Hofmeyr also introduced me to Prof. 

Bethlehem and I was delighted when she agreed to be my external supervisor. 

Prof. Bethlehem’s recent research resonates with some of my own work and I 

was deeply appreciative of the opportunity to enter into a productive academic 

dialogue with members of her research team at the Hebrew University of 

Jerusalem. Despite a demanding schedule, Prof. Bethlehem also supported me 

in a variety of ways, including providing prompt and invaluable feedback and 

advice on my dissertation and sharing her wisdom and experience on building a 

career in the academy.  

 

I also wish to extend my thanks to Dr Jiang Hui whose introductions and 

recommendations allowed me to secure a scholarship as a visiting PhD student 

at Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2017. This year proved to be 

foundational for the project as a whole. 

 

Finally, I feel very fortunate to have been able to draw on the support of a 

network of friends and family across the world on what was a long and often 

lonely journey. Without their interest, enthusiasm, compassion and love, it 

would have been impossible to see this project through to its conclusion. I am 

particularly grateful to my beloved cousin Rebecca for always believing in me 

and cheering me on as well as my dear friends Germaine and Tiffany for their 

tireless encouragement and interest. I also wish to thank my dear friends 

Lauren, Robert, and Chris for being there for me in their own unique ways 

throughout this journey.          

 

 



iii 

 

Abstract 

In the present study, I sketch a translation history of Black literatures in China 

prior to 1966, and propose that the paratexts to these works may be excavated 

for insights into the role of Blackness and Africa in the Chinese imaginary and 

how it impacted the presentation and translation of Black literatures. I show 

how factors such as the emergent racialized Chinese world view in the early 

twentieth century, indignation at the treatment of China and its people at home 

and abroad, conceptions of literary modernism and oppressed people’s 

literatures during the May Fourth era in the 1920s, the development of a left-

wing politics in the literary establishment during the 1930s, Soviet-oriented 

translation policies and anti-US ideologies in the early 1950s, as well as the 

emphasis on anti-colonialism and Third World solidarity in the early 1960s, 

impacted the translation and paratextual framings of diasporic Black, and 

subsequently, Black African literatures. The project reveals a high degree of 

consistency in the themes grappled with in paratextual presentations across the 

decades but highlights how changing political priorities in particular could 

instigate discursive shifts. The project also highlights how the individual agency 

of marginal actors in the Chinese literary sphere (in the early period) and Black 

African writers (in the Maoist era) could also lead to translation activity. 

Ultimately, the project foregrounds the overwhelming determinism of non-

literary factors in the translation of Black literatures until the 1960s, when there 

is some evidence of an aesthetic appreciation of the works of Ousmane 

Sembène. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



iv 

 

A note on the use of Chinese, translated titles and the 

capitalization of ‘Black’ 

 
The present study is based on a large corpus of primary Chinese-language 

sources that are not accessible in digitized form online and generally not widely 

available outside of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the interests of 

academic integrity and transparency, all translations from these sources include 

the original Chinese text in the relevant footnote. It must be noted that, due to a 

quirk in the Microsoft Word program, each Chinese character is counted as a 

separate word. Over twelve thousand characters have been used in this 

dissertation and the total number of words is thus greatly inflated. I have used 

simplified Chinese characters throughout, although some of the original sources 

make use of traditional characters and others a mixture of traditional and 

simplified. I also make use of pinyin, the standard romanization system in the 

PRC. All translations from Chinese into English are my own unless otherwise 

indicated. 

 

This dissertation refers to the titles of Chinese works, Chinese translations of 

works with a known original title, and Chinese translations of works with an 

unknown original title. Where a recognized English title is supplied in the 

original publication, I indicate this by italicizing and capitalizing the words of 

the title. Where the Chinese translation provides an English translation of the 

Chinese title of a non-English work for which the original title is unknown, I 

indicate this by using double quotation marks.  I also do this in cases where a 

foreign writer’s work has been published as an original Chinese publication 

(such as when Chinese publishers have published Chinese-language anthologies 

of unpublished foreign poetry). Where original titles are available, they are 

italicized and capitalized as is standard practice. In cases where I have translated 

the title into English myself, it appears in ordinary Roman font in the footnotes 

and bibliography and in single quotation marks in brackets in the body of the 

dissertation. 

 

I have chosen to capitalize ‘Black’ throughout this dissertation, in keeping with 

recent trends in academia and journalism. This is in recognition of its status as a 

signifier of a racial or cultural identity and not merely a colour. However, in the 

case of quotations, I have followed the capitalization protocols of the scholar in 

question. In certain sections, the outdated and offensive word ‘Negro’ has also 

been retained for translations from periods in which it was in common use. 

 

 

 



v 

 

Table of Contents 

 

Acknowledgements        ii 

Abstract          iii 

A note on the use of Chinese, translated titles and the capitalization of 

‘Black’          iv 

 

Introduction          1 

Part 1:  The pre-Qing to the late Republican period up to 1936 

Chapter 1: The Black slave topos: A marker of pre-Mao literary and 

socio-historical constructions of Blackness and Africa 32 

Chapter 2: Abject trajectories: Black literature and the Black modern in 

the Republican era       89 

Part 2:  The early to middle years of the Maoist period (1949–1965) 

 

Chapter 3: From The Path of Thunder to Mine Boy: The paratextual 

presentation of Peter Abrahams’s works in communist China 

(1952–1959)               156 

Chapter 4: On the road to Tashkent: The Chinese literary 

establishment’s reluctant embrace of Black African literature 

(1953–1958)               208 

Chapter 5: In praise of “the real Black Africa”: Presenting African 

literature to Chinese readers during and after the Afro-Asian 

Writers’ Conference in Tashkent (1958–1965)          247 

 

      Conclusion                  303 

 Bibliography                 308



1 

 

Introduction 

 

I. ‘In the shadow of the Black slave’: a vignette 

In 1982, Lijiang Press (‘Lijiang chubanshe’) published a new Chinese 

vernacular version of one of the most translated foreign novels in the history of 

China: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).1 The first 

translation of the novel in 1901 was also the first-ever full-length rendering of 

an American novel in Chinese. As chapters one and two of the present work 

will reveal, it had an unprecedented impact on Chinese society, spawning not 

only other translations but also theatrical versions, children’s books and even 

comics. Yet, it was not entirely Stowe’s original story that had struck such a 

chord; instead, its first translators, Lin Shu and Wei Yi, framed the text with a 

“Translator’s Note” that connected the plight of the Black slaves in the US to 

that of Chinese labourers working abroad. They also intervened extensively in 

the translation itself in order to make it serve their political agenda of provoking 

indignation at the treatment of Chinese people and spurring the reading 

audience to take action. In their version of the story, the title character recedes 

into the background and the novel’s religious sentiments are muted. Despite its 

anti-slavery message, the novel becomes complicit in reinforcing the image of 

                                           
1 Qi, Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation, 139. 



2 

 

Blackness that was taking root in the discourses of Lin Shu’s massively 

influential Qing reformer peers, who were turning to evolutionary discourses 

and Social Darwinism to explain the desperate situation that China found itself 

in internationally and domestically at the end of the nineteenth century. 

Yinghong Cheng suggests that Blackness became an intrinsic part of the new 

world view in which a global racial category was created that largely ignored 

ethnic or geographic differences and was contrasted unfavourably with the 

global white and ‘yellow’ or Chinese categories.2 The Black or ‘Black slave’ 

category was constructed as racially inferior to the Chinese on the basis of 

anthropological and pseudoscientific theories. This inferiority “facilitated the 

Social Darwinist discourse of national survival” politically as Blacks were the 

“hopeless losers” in the struggle between the races and their imagined fate was 

construed as essential for China to avoid. Cheng argues that these abject 

discourses of Blackness have remained largely unchanged into the present. I 

will return to these issues below and throughout the present study. 

 

In light of the above, I suggest that the paratexts that serve to introduce and 

contextualize the Lijiang Press translation may be seen as sites in which these 

discourses continue to be negotiated. In the present study, I establish a way of 

reading such paratexts against the backdrop of the institutionalization (and 

                                           
2 Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, 180–81. 



3 

 

fossilization) of a particular view of Blackness in China. According to such a 

reading, the paratexts to this translation may be shown to be drawing on a well-

established but largely negative cultural understanding of Blackness. By using 

the same title as the Lin Shu/Wei Yi translation, the editor/translator invites 

educated readers to connect the new version with that celebrated translation. Hu 

Wenye’s introduction reinforces this link by referring to Lin Shu in its very first 

sentence and evoking the late Qing/early Republican era.3 The title itself is the 

site of one of the first displacements enacted by the original translators. Instead 

of translating the title directly (as some later translations did), Lin Shu and Wei 

Yi called their translation Heinu yu tian lu or “The black slave cries out to 

heaven”, thereby replacing the figure of Uncle Tom with the impersonal 

collective image of Black slaves bewailing their predicament.4 The Lijiang 

Press edition, translated by Zhang Peijun, therefore re-enacts this displacement, 

reviving an image that is at best tangentially related to the actual plot of the 

novel or its characters. The original translation thus becomes an alternative 

point of reference to the source text, particularly for those who were familiar 

with it, while readers approaching the text for the first time gain a view of the 

text that is strongly mediated by the connotations of Blackness and slavery, and 

the connection between the two, in the Chinese imaginary.  

                                           
3 Hu, ‘Zhu baihua xinyi quanben Heinu yu tian lu’ 祝白话新译全本《黑奴吁天录》出版 [Celebrating the new 

and complete vernacular translation of Heinu yu tian lu], 1. 
4 I have used Baker’s translation of the title. See Baker, ‘Translated Images of the Foreign in the Early Works of 

Lin Shu (1852-1924) and Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973): Accommodation and Appropriation’, 95. 



4 

 

More striking still is the selection of cover image (see figure 1). In this 

racialized framework, Zhang Daping’s artwork evokes a wide range of negative 

connotations that had served to buttress Chinese notions of superiority over 

Black people. This image reinforces the impersonal and collective associations 

of the title rather than referring to actual characters or events in the novel itself. 

The stooped, naked figure evokes the humiliation of chattel slavery and the 

suffering it inflicted as well as the supposed savage, bestial nature of Blacks. 

The figure’s isolation recalls the perceived inability of the Black slave ‘race’, 

spread across Africa and its diasporic regions, to be self-conscious national 

subjects and unite to defeat oppression. In this regard, it is not surprising that 

the summary on the inside flap of the front cover reiterates the apocryphal 

quotation, attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that Stowe’s book had started the war 

that freed the slaves; Black agency in such an enterprise was thought to be 

impossible. The closed eyes, with their connotations of a lack of consciousness 

or prayer, are emblematic of a people who were supposedly narcotized by the 

religion of their white oppressors, an idea that incurred the scorn of generations 

of Chinese cultural mediators. No wonder Lin Shu and Wei Yi were successful 

in their attempt to provoke indignation by drawing parallels between the 

treatment of these people and that meted out to Chinese by foreigners.  

 

 



5 

 

 

Figure 1: Cover of the Lijiang Press translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (photograph by 

author) 

The influence of left-wing ideologies and the connections with the world 

beyond China that they enabled would introduce divergent notions of Blackness 

from the 1920s onwards but never fully dislodge this cluster of discourses that 

are analogous to what Cheng calls a living “fossil”, relatively unchanged over 

time but as viable in the China of the 1980s as they are today.5   

                                           
5 Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, 20. 



6 

 

My project suggests that, by the 1950s, an imaginative re-invention of both 

Blacks and Blackness in the minds of Chinese publics was necessary in order to 

legitimate the foreign policy objectives of the Chinese Communist Party and the 

cultural/political activities that these objectives impacted. Among these 

activities were efforts to translate Black African works for Chinese readers, a 

watershed moment in the history of cultural exchanges between China and 

Africa. In the present study, I am primarily concerned with situating this 

Maoist-era translation enterprise in the context of the racialized discursive 

legacy that I have adumbrated here. I offer a history of the translation of Black 

works prior to this era that highlights how these racialized discourses emerged 

and could suppress or enable translation activity, as well as how they were 

negotiated, often in response to the political priorities of the historical moment, 

through paratextual as well as other materials. I then contextualize the 

translation activities of the era in light of this history and the persistence of 

these discourses. Such a move exposes the discourses of anti-colonialism and 

Third World solidarity that characterize the period as being in tension with 

negative conceptions of Blackness and Africa that had often diverted Chinese 

cultural mediators and reading publics away from engagement with the 

continent, its people (including those of its diasporas) and its cultural products. 

The outbreak of the Cultural Revolution represents the natural endpoint of my 

discussion as all journals and magazines devoted to literary translations were 

shut down and no translations of foreign works of literature appeared between 



7 

 

1966 and 1971.6 Only thirty-four such works in total had been published by the 

end of this period in 1976. In addition, as I will show later in the present work, 

the translation of Black African literature was inextricably linked to China’s 

involvement in the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau (AAWB) after 1958; this 

participation would also diminish in 1966 with the split between the Permanent 

Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers located in Cairo and AAWB in Beijing.7    

 

II. Context and rationale 

In recent years, the racialized character of contemporary Chinese society has 

attracted the attention of the media and a number of scholars.8 The 

discrimination suffered by Black residents of Guangzhou during the COVID-19 

pandemic and the use of ‘Blackface’ in the Chinese Spring Festival variety 

show that is watched by millions are merely some of the latest episodes in a 

history of incidents stretching back to the late 1950s, a number of which are 

mentioned elsewhere in the present work.9 At the same time, it is well known 

that the late 1950s marked the beginning of a period of engagement with Africa 

that has shifted in character over the decades with the changing priorities of 

                                           
6 Qi, Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation, 126. 
7 Yoon, ‘“Our Forces Have Redoubled”’, 234. 
8 In addition to numerous works by Frank Dikötter, some of which will be cited in this thesis, see also Barry 

Sautman (1994, 1997), Sautman and Hairong Yan (2007, 2009, 2016), Yinghong Cheng (2011, 2019), Ian Law 

(2012), and M. Dujohn Johnson (2007). 
9 See, for example, Wang, ‘From Covid to Blackface on TV, China’s Racism Problem Runs Deep’. 

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/18/covid-blackface-tv-chinas-racism-problem-runs-deep, last accessed 1 

November 2021 



8 

 

China’s Party State and their African interlocutors. Noting that “Africa–China 

literary relations” have to date “received only cursory attention”, Karen 

Thornber emphasizes that “literary engagement provides valuable perspectives 

on some of today’s most controversial and anxiety producing transregional 

dynamics, and it brings to the fore numerous aspects of transnational and 

transregional engagements that might otherwise be obscured in global history 

discourse”.10 While much has been written about the economic and political 

aspects of the  relationship between Africa and China, this project thus 

foregrounds the less familiar cultural terrain. As mentioned above, the 

translation of African works occurred in the 1950s, during what were also the 

initial stages of the Sino-African relationship writ large. I ask whether 

understanding the nature of the engagement during that historical moment, in 

the specific domain of literary translation, can shed light on the forces at play in 

this relationship up to the present day as well as its hidden possibilities and 

barriers. With concerns that resonate with Thornber’s emphasis on the neglected 

“human dimension” of this relationship in mind, I have sketched a history that is 

marked not only by race and ideological influences but also the initiatives of 

individual agents whose contributions deserve recognition and further critical 

attention.11 

                                           
10 Thornber, ‘Breaking Discipline, Integrating Literature’, 712. 
11 Thornber, 697. 



9 

 

The first wave of Third World translations in Maoist China has been considered 

in several recent studies, most of which do not distinguish meaningfully 

between Black African works and those of Latin America or Asia. To some 

extent, this lack of differentiation may be an outcome of China’s own 

longstanding use of “yafeila” or “Asia–Africa–Latin America” in discussions of 

its “official foreign policy” towards these regions to this day, more recently 

“under the guise of Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative”.12 Nicolai 

Volland locates the literatures of these regions in a largely undifferentiated 

translation “zone” of “Third World countries” during the early Maoist period 

while acknowledging that African works received attention somewhat later than 

the others.13 Similarly, Paola Iovene includes them under the rubric of 

“anticolonial literatures” without distinguishing clearly between their respective 

trajectories.14 The present project affirms Yinghong Cheng’s assertion that 

“images of Africa and black people have been portrayed and constructed as a 

non-Chinese Other throughout history”, often reflecting “China’s own problems 

and desires”, and thus proposes that viewing the translation of Black African 

literatures through this lens allows for a more nuanced account of ‘Afro-Asian’ 

cultural exchanges between China and Africa.15 In this respect, Shu-mei Shih’s 

2013 essay ‘Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth 

                                           
12 Vanhove, ‘“A World to Win”’, 161. 
13 Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism, 177–78. 
14 Iovene, Tales of Futures Past, 66. 
15 Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, 231. 



10 

 

Century’, in which she situates the 1984 translation of Ferdinand Oyono’s novel 

Une vie de boy in the “post-socialist” context of the China of the 1980s by 

exploring the relation between the legacy of Mao’s “Third Worldism” and the 

longstanding but often repressed prejudice against Black Africans, served as a 

invaluable precedent for my approach in the present study.16 Shih’s account 

reveals the “anticolonial, revolutionary language” of the translation’s paratext to 

be “merely rhetorical” by the 1980s. Shih also investigates the language of the 

single translated text itself while my discussion strategically foregoes individual 

translations in favour of a large corpus of paratextual material that frames 

multiple works. However, my approach is similar in the sense that it situates the 

entire Black African translation enterprise of the Maoist era against the same 

racialized backdrop. 

 

Lydia Liu and Duncan Yoon emphasize China’s contribution to the Afro-Asian 

Writers’ Bureau during this period and argue for an alternative conception of 

postcolonialism, based on horizontal vectors between Global South actors rather 

than between such actors and the colonial metropole. Invoking the Chinese 

translation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) in the translation 

journal Shijie wenxue as an example, Liu states that the work was exposed to 

Chinese readers long before it became known in the West and that “Achebe had 

                                           
16 Shih, ‘Race and Revolution’, 157–61. 



11 

 

been recognized first as a distinguished Afro-Asian writer in China, Egypt, 

India, the Soviet Union, and other countries before he became a postcolonial 

Anglophone (African) writer”.17 Liu argues that this constitutes a different mode 

of recognition from that enacted in the West and locates it in “the forgotten 

history of post-Bandung Afro-Asian writers’ interactions and solidarity in 1958-

1970”. Yoon highlights the influence of Maoist ideas on the initial platform of 

the Bureau and how these ideas were subsequently appropriated in the 

formulation of its own concept of postcolonialism.18  

 

While my project does not contest these claims of an alternative ‘Afro-Asian’ 

concept of postcolonialism, it uncovers a striking unevenness in the Chinese 

coverage of Afro-Asian literatures across the 1950s. While the literatures of 

other Third World regions were translated from the early 1950s onwards with a 

further burst of activity after Bandung, Black African works were virtually 

ignored until the run-up to the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau Conference in 

Tashkent in late 1958. While Liu and Yoon both highlight the significance of 

this conference, they do not consider the relatively unique handling of Black 

African works before, during and even after this event. My project also offers a 

tentative hierarchy of Black African writers in the Chinese literary sphere 

                                           
17 Liu, ‘The Eventfulness of Translation’, 162. 
18 Yoon, ‘“Our Forces Have Redoubled”’, 237–40. 



12 

 

during this brief period, based on numbers of individual translation publications 

as well as particular features of their paratextual presentations; in this 

framework, figures who would become prominent postcolonial figures in the 

Western academy such as Achebe or Senghor are noteworthy precisely because 

of the seeming lack of attention paid to them while other, less well-known 

writers seem to have garnered greater favour in many instances. While it is 

difficult to account for this, I speculate on an alternative ‘mode of recognition’ 

in which the translation of Black African writers’ works was at least partially 

contingent on the individual writer’s willingness to speak or write approvingly 

of China or the CCP, visit the country itself or interact with Chinese cultural 

mediators. These public gestures of recognition were then deployed in 

translation paratexts that carefully positioned Chinese reading publics vis-à-vis 

the Afro-Asian translation enterprise as a whole and the Black African writer in 

question. These factors appear to have been internal to the Chinese context and 

the extent to which they may be subsumed under the activities of the Bureau or 

explicated by notions of ‘Afro-Asian solidarity’ requires further investigation. 

 

Finally, the present study is concerned with the transmission of Black African 

works in China and thus resonates with transnational approaches to African 

literature. While the discussion encompasses the early twentieth century in 

China, my main focus is the early Maoist era which was set against the 



13 

 

backdrop of the Cold War and the initial period of decolonization. I consider 

some of the implications of these broader geopolitical shifts in the domain of 

translation, one of the dominant modes of cultural exchange between Third 

World actors. In this respect, my work complements recent scholarship by 

Lahaie, Barnai and Bethlehem on the “hypertransmission” or the “intensive 

print circulation” of Peter Abrahams’s novel The Path of Thunder and its 

“adaptation across other media and genres of expressive culture” in the Soviet 

Union.19  In the pro-Soviet climate of the early PRC, the translation of 

Abrahams’s novel may be seen as an outcome of its mass transmission in the 

Soviet Union while its Chinese paratextual handling raises similar concerns to 

those identified in its ballet adaptation around the ‘erasure’ of various aspects of 

its provenance. Moreover, the introduction to a recent volume entitled The 

Cultural Cold War and the Global South foregrounds “the idiosyncratic and 

sometimes unpredictable encounters” as “Third World” writers and other agents  

“navigated the ideological and material constraints set out by superpowers and 

emerging or imagined regional powers”.20 Chapter five of the present work also 

highlights the role of such encounters, such as those at the Afro-Asian Writers 

Bureau Conference in Tashkent and elsewhere, in the trajectories of African 

writers and their works in a China that aspired to leadership of the Third World. 

                                           
19 Lahaie, Barnai, and Bethlehem, ‘Choreographing Ideology: On the Ballet Adaptation of Peter Abrahams’ The 

Path of Thunder in the Soviet Union’, 288. 
20 Bystrom, Popescu, and Zien, The Cultural Cold War and the Global South, 3. 



14 

 

III. Methodological considerations 

While the present study may be of interest to scholars in the fields of translation 

studies and African literature, it is crucial to emphasize that the project 

foregrounds the paratext as a site of ideological mediation and proposes that 

investigating this site yields insights into the role of Blackness in the Chinese 

literary sphere and the broader Chinese imaginary. It then recruits these insights 

in contextualizing the trajectory of Black African works in China during the 

Maoist period. Paratexts include material that is “part of the book itself (titles, 

covers, blurbs, prefaces, illustrations) or a prolongation of the book that is 

placed outside it (such as advertisements and interviews)”.21 Gérard Genette, 

who first defined paratexts and conceptualized their role, calls the former 

peritexts and the latter epitexts. In the Chinese context, they are a uniquely 

valuable resource as they provide a discursive record of the ways in which a 

wide variety of both major and minor cultural agents (translators, editors, 

ideological functionaries), impacted by the shifting demands of their historical 

moments, sought to position works about and by Blacks for Chinese readerships 

across several decades. My project thus attempts to account for translation 

activity and uses paratexts to translations as a heuristic to shed light on the 

Chinese context, rather than analysing the translations themselves or discussing 

theories or literary criticism associated with their source texts. Drawing on a 

                                           
21 Alvstad, ‘The Strategic Moves of Paratexts’, 78. 



15 

 

large corpus of peritextual and epitextual materials, as well as other types of 

commentary in some limited instances, I have been able to pursue a diachronic 

approach in this project, allowing me to gain an overview of trends in the 

paratextual representation of Blackness over key periods of modern Chinese 

history. This corpus comes from an extensive collection of translation journals, 

plays, novels, and anthologies of poetry and short stories, that was assembled 

through online purchases from second-hand bookshops throughout China. The 

process of tracking down pre-1966 Chinese translations of Black African and 

diasporic works, as well as items relevant to them in important journals, took 

several years.22 

 

In the field of research on paratexts, I draw on the contributions of a number of 

scholars. Urpo Kovala’s pioneering study of the paratexts to Finnish translations 

of Anglo-American literature between 1890 and 1939 and his revelation of how 

“religious–conservative” ideology enacted what he terms ideological closure (or 

the delimitation of possible readings) through these paratexts provoked me to 

consider how longstanding negative ideologies of Blackness could facilitate 

certain paratextual representations of Blackness and foreclose others while the 

advent of other ideologies at particular historical moments could modulate, even 

                                           
22 Mingjian Zha and Tianzhen Xie’s two-volume Zhongguo 20 shiji waiguo wenxue fanyi shi [A History of the 

20th century Foreign Literary Translation in China] (2007) was an invaluable resource for identifying a number 

of translations. 



16 

 

contest, such representations.23 Kovala’s concept of ideological closure and his 

elucidation of the specific features of epitexts are particularly valuable in my 

discussion of Zhao Jingshen’s paratextual histories in chapter two. Crucially, 

Kovala’s 1996 article established the legitimacy of translation paratexts as a 

research object.  

 

Richard Watts has produced several studies of the colonial and postcolonial 

paratexts of Francophone African literature for French metropolitan as well as 

for African and Western audiences. Central to Watts’s studies is the observation 

that the paratexts to African works, under the pressure of important historical 

changes, underwent significant changes in the context that he investigates. In 

the context of my study, the content of the Chinese paratexts to works by Black 

writers displays a high degree of thematic consistency across the eras. However, 

constrained by cultural understandings of Blackness that did not alter 

significantly over time, such discursive innovation as there was indeed appears 

also to have been spurred by historical/political changes. In addition, in Watts’s 

discussion of the paratexts to Francophone women’s writing, he refers to the use 

of what he calls the “curriculum vitæ” (in blurbs for example), which often 

listed details about the writer’s life and work background in order to “vouch for 

the reliability of the woman writer and of her appropriateness as witness to a 

                                           
23 See Kovala, ‘Translations, Paratextual Mediation, and Ideological Closure’, 119–47. 



17 

 

particular event or, more often, sociological condition”.24 I discovered a similar 

phenomenon in the paratexts to Black African works translated during the 

Maoist period, in which details of a writer’s supposed ‘lived’ experience were 

provided insofar as they established the veracity of the work in question and the 

writer’s right to testify as to the odiousness of colonialism and imperialism. 

Such information was also included to signal that the work fulfilled some of the 

central criteria of the socialist realist/Maoist artistic paradigm and was therefore 

suitable for publication. I have referred to this as the testimonial function of 

Black literatures in the present work. 

 

Cecilia Alvstad’s article on the paratexts of the translations of global South 

literature in Sweden also drew my attention to certain important ethical issues in 

the use of paratexts. Common to both the Chinese (especially during the period 

of the Chinese involvement in the activities of the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau) 

and the Swedish context is the construction of a transnational corpus of works 

from non-Western countries, under the rubric of ‘Afro-Asian’ literature in the 

Chinese case and ‘world literature’ in the Swedish case; these rubrics 

themselves create implicit connections between works that are actually quite 

dissimilar on the basis of their non-Western origins.25 The tendency to read 

                                           
24 Watts, Packaging Post/Coloniality, sec. ‘The Social Utility of Women’s Writing’. 
25 Alvstad, ‘The Strategic Moves of Paratexts’, 81–84. 



18 

 

these works as sources of anthropological, historical or cultural information, 

based on the assumption that translation renders the cultural Other transparent 

and knowable despite its exoticism, broadly typifies both contexts as well.26 

Alvstad shows how inclusion on publishers’ lists, for example, creates 

connections between literatures that would otherwise have little or nothing in 

common, and paratexts, such as blurbs and forewords, or presentations on 

publishers’ websites, then reinforce these connections. The works thus “run the 

risk of being paratextually ‘translated’ into sameness, [and having] their internal 

differences minimized”, “practices [which] might be politically and ethically 

problematic”.27 This is perhaps most applicable to my discussion of the 

publishing house Writers Press (‘Zuojia chubanshe’) in chapter five which 

created their own series composed of works exclusively from Asia and Africa, 

provided a generic introduction to the series on the inside front cover of the 

books as well as author biographies on the inside back cover, and listed all the 

works in the series on a flyleaf page or on a bookmark that was placed in the 

books. In addition, as Alvstad points out, the use of references to geographical 

location may at times serve to foreground the author’s origins, perhaps to create 

a sense of authenticity or representativeness not in keeping with the agenda of 

the work in the source culture; references to geographical location were also 

inserted into this list of works in the Chinese case, raising precisely such 

                                           
26 Alvstad, 87–91. 
27 Alvstad, 79. 



19 

 

concerns. Moreover, through similar presentation strategies, paratextual 

connections are created between works that would otherwise not have much in 

common.28 This issue arises in the Writers Press series as well as in chapter 

three, in which I argue that the paratextual presentation of the Chinese 

translation of Peter Abrahams’s The Path of Thunder is almost indistinguishable 

from other works in a series dominated by writers from socialist countries, 

rendering the provenance of the novel and its author virtually invisible to 

Chinese readers.  Finally, as Alvstad points out, the desire to access information 

about the places associated with these literatures may also be problematic.29 

Although Alvstad concedes that the intention may not always be that books or 

authors represent their source cultures or provide knowledge as to the actual 

conditions in their countries, the emphasis on geography may lead readers to 

expect that the work deal with, for example, “Third World topics” in the 

Swedish case or provide specific kinds of information. Throughout the corpus 

of Maoist-era Chinese translations of Black African literature, the educational 

function of the translated texts in helping Chinese readers to become more 

familiar with their source cultures is repeatedly stressed in the paratexts, 

implying that translated works can provide direct, unmediated access to their 

respective cultures and perhaps simultaneously diminishing their creative or 

aesthetic dimensions. While I have not used Alvstad’s article as an explicit 

                                           
28 Alvstad, 83–84. 
29 Alvstad, 86–87. 



20 

 

comparative frame of reference, her delineation of these issues informed much 

of my discussion. 

 

Overall, the consistency with which themes and imagery as well as words and 

phrases reappeared across the paratextual corpora of different eras shaped how I 

engaged with the material. Having established the pervasiveness of what I call 

the Black slave topos across a range of domains in the early chapters, these 

consistencies allowed me to posit the existence of relatively stable ideologies of 

Blackness as well as their resilience over time. My focus became tracking the 

instances of grappling with these ideologies in the literary/translation domain 

across the decades while attempting to account for discursive variations, 

absences, and innovations. While I was able at times to speculate on factors 

arising in the context of the biographies of individual cultural mediators in 

attempting to characterize such phenomena, situating the paratexts in the 

context of their particular cultural, political or historical moments consistently 

generated relatively plausible explanatory frameworks. In considering the 

methodological implications of the project, a number of questions arise of 

which two seem most pertinent. Firstly, while publishing conventions in a 

particular time and place clearly impact both the form and content of paratexts, 

to what extent do paratextual representations around particular topics establish 

their own discursive legacies beyond such conventions, perhaps conditioning 



21 

 

future representations? There is evidence of this in the cluster of paratexts 

produced in the late 1920s/early 1930s as well as those that framed Black 

American and Black African works in the 1950s. Secondly, reflecting on a 

context in which information about Africa and its writers was often purportedly 

scarce and there is evidence of borrowing on the part of various paratext writers, 

to what extent can past paratextual materials function as sources for future ones, 

perhaps thereby perpetuating misconceptions or misreadings? In the Chinese 

context, everything from factual information and linguistic structures to themes 

and imagery could be borrowed from earlier paratexts. Furthermore, what do 

such phenomena reveal about the cultural, historical or political contexts in 

which they arise and are they more prevalent in certain kinds of contexts than in 

others? Ultimately, paratexts constitute unique historical archives that do not 

only register ideological mediations and their intersections with broader 

contextual changes but record or hint at the hidden interactions and decisions of 

those involved in the creation of these materials. 

 

IV. Chapter summaries 

In chapter one, I show how a contingent discourse of Blackness, a tool for 

othering a wide range of peoples, had long been a part of Chinese cultural 

chauvinism by the turn of the nineteenth century. I suggest that the figure of the 

Black slave may be seen as a touchstone that epitomizes the perceptions of 



22 

 

Africa and its inhabitants from approximately the mid-nineteenth century 

onwards. Africa and Africans, though not entirely unknown in China prior to 

this, barely figured in the Chinese imaginary until Chinese intellectuals began to 

update their indigenous knowledge with Western geographical texts and 

missionaries began to spread accounts of a race specifically referred to as 

‘Black’ and its homeland, often in negative racialized terms. The advent of 

Social Darwinist ideas in the final decades of the Qing Empire, and their 

appropriation by Chinese nationalist intellectuals, led to more elaborate 

racialized discourses in which Blacks were often mentioned as being at the 

bottom of a global racial hierarchy (with Africa replicating this subordinate 

position in geographical space), as Chinese thinkers struggled to overcome the 

contradiction between their assertions of racial superiority, the reality of 

national humiliation, and their anxieties about racial extinction. I show how the 

figure of the Black slave, through its use as a negative racial polarity, became a 

mainstay of racialized scientific and educational discourse from the turn of the 

century well into the Republican era and contend that this was also most likely 

due to the impact of Lin Shu and Wei Yi’s paratextual framing and translation 

of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which became a turning point for the visibility of Blacks 

and Blackness in the world of Chinese discourse. However, the translators’ use 

of the novel for their own political purposes and its inherent racialized 

ideologies served to do little more than substantiate the image conveyed through 

the sociological and racialized paradigms taking root in China. Despite the 



23 

 

fervour of his opposition to the humiliation of Chinese at home and abroad at 

the hands of white imperialists and colonisers, I suggest that Lin Shu’s 

translation oeuvre ultimately appears to have sanctioned colonialism through its 

attempt to construct a new nationalistic vision for Chinese manhood while 

Africa and its peoples became little more than objects of Chinese colonial 

desires.  

 

After the fall of the Qing dynasty and during the course of the first two decades 

of the Republican era, the contributions of a number of scholars reveal that 

racialized thinking became intrinsic to the emergent modern Chinese identity. I 

assert that the Black slave figure became a motif across a wide range of 

discourses during the same period. The legacy of the translation of Uncle Tom's 

Cabin by Lin Shu and Wei Yi continued to spawn new versions of the perennial 

story while simultaneously perpetuating what I have called the Black slave 

topos in the Chinese imaginary. A central claim of this study is that the 

benighted and monolithic image of a continent of irretrievably inferior peoples, 

the original homeland of the displaced slave race in America, was consolidated 

by this distinctive textual/paratextual legacy and that this may have had lasting 

effect on the Chinese interest in, and understanding of, Africa, its anti-colonial 

struggles and its literatures. 

 



24 

 

In chapter two, I contend that, during the 1920s, engagement with Black 

literature was hindered by the institutionalization of racial hierarchism as the 

core of the belief system of the modernizing Chinese elite in general and, in the 

literary sphere, the desire for Western literary modernity by the dominant May 

Fourth faction. While a number of prominent Chinese writer–translators began 

to express an interest in the literatures of so-called ‘oppressed’ or ‘small and 

weak’ nations, Black peoples were effectively denied nationhood under the 

ideological pressure of the Black slave topos and their literatures were therefore 

all but invisible in the Chinese milieu. As the country became a polarized 

political space, contested by the Nationalists and the Communists, due to a 

number of internal crises in the mid-1920s, I suggest that the lurch towards left-

wing sympathies by the dominant figures in the literary establishment and the 

increasing levels of interaction with the socialist world through the Comintern 

and other bodies seemed to occasion a shift in the visibility and status of Black 

peoples. The actual struggles of African Americans in particular could finally be 

foregrounded and examined.  

 

I go on to highlight how Zhao Jingshen, a minor figure in the literary 

establishment, attempted to raise awareness of Black literature with his 

paratextual histories, despite his reluctance to offer a wholehearted endorsement 

of the literary value of works by Black writers and his dismissive attitude 



25 

 

towards the contributions of all but a few. I speculate that this was due to 

exposure to issues affecting Black communities worldwide through the 

international socialist networks and publications. By 1933, when another 

peripheral figure, Yang Changxi, penned the first ever full-length study of 

Black literature, it is clear that left-wing ideology could be deployed to counter 

the tenets of the Black slave topos and to recover Black nationhood; I suggest 

that this in turn allowed Black literature to be recovered as an expression of the 

nationalistic or revolutionary consciousness of a nation. It should be noted, 

however, that this alone was not sufficient to challenge the racialized ideologies 

that were by then pervasive in China. Indeed, a direct confrontation with not 

only white oppression of Black peoples but the racism that motivated and 

enabled it was, as yet, not possible in the Chinese context. 

 

In chapter three, I begin to contest the notion that Afro-Asian solidarity is an 

appropriate framework in which to situate all the translations of Black African 

works in the early Maoist period by arguing that the translation of Peter 

Abrahams’s The Path of Thunder (1948) in the newly established PRC must be 

seen as motivated primarily by commercial and political expedience at a time 

when the Chinese publishing industry was consumed with the translation of 

Soviet and Soviet-sanctioned works. Indeed, I show that the paratextual 

protocols enacted to frame the translation negate the significance of the novel’s 



26 

 

debut by obscuring its provenance through the omission of vital contextual 

information and submerging it in a series of works from the socialist world 

through the use of a shared Eurocentric cover image. Later paratextual 

handlings of Abrahams’s works would resemble those of African American 

writers; in both cases, I provide evidence of how the denunciation of racial 

oppression was used as an ideological weapon against a universal imperialist 

adversary of which the United States had initially been the primary incarnation. 

Ultimately, however, I speculate that the paratextual treatment of the later 

translation of Abrahams’s novel Mine Boy (1946) signals a shift towards an 

emphasis on Black African literature and parallels a significant change in 

orientation in the CCP’s foreign policy towards expressions of support and 

solidarity with the struggles of African nations at the end of the 1950s.    

 

In chapter four, I suggest that, despite the fervent castigation of racial 

discrimination against Black Americans that characterized the early Maoist 

period, the racialized world view that had emerged in the first half of the 

twentieth century did not alter meaningfully under the communist regime. 

Nevertheless, the CCP’s foreign policy objectives came to emphasize 

engagement with African nations and liberation movements as a means of 

ending China’s international isolation and ultimately challenging the Soviet 

Union for leadership of the Third World. The work of several scholars has 



27 

 

suggested that this seems to have led to the adoption of a ‘colour’ strategy in 

interactions with Black interlocutors in which Chinese officials and 

functionaries, including Mao Zedong himself, presented the Chinese as people 

of colour. However, there is some evidence that, despite the growing emphasis 

on solidarity with Third World peoples, claims of racial unity were muted when 

domestic audiences were being addressed; I add to this that these claims are also 

conspicuously absent from the later paratexts to Black African works. 

 

Indeed, while it is evident that the political priorities of the CCP ultimately 

impelled the translation of African literatures, I argue that the Chinese literary 

establishment do not seem to have engaged with Black African literatures in the 

period immediately after the Bandung conference, generally seen as a turning 

point for Afro-Asian solidarity. Instead, Asian and North African literatures 

account for much of the translation activity, as revealed in the principal 

translation journal of the era Yiwen. Dominated by May Fourth veterans such as 

Mao Dun, it is possible that the literary elite struggled to adapt to the demands 

of the new political environment, shaped, as they were, in a prior era in which 

Black literatures had never been a focus (not even under the rubric of 

‘oppressed people’s writings’ that had previously garnered their attention) and 

Soviet and Western literatures had been their primary points of reference for 

assigning literary value. I contend that there is evidence of a shift towards Black 



28 

 

African literatures in the year leading up the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in 

Tashkent in 1958 and highlight the growing if marginal discursive presence of 

Blackness in Yiwen, manifested in a small number of Africa-related items and 

the inclusion of Black American texts and artworks.   

 

In chapter five, with the framework developed over the prior chapters in mind, I 

describe the paratextual framing of the initial flurry of translations that appeared 

in Yiwen in September 1958, in anticipation of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau 

Conference in Tashkent the following month. While these translations offered 

Chinese readers unprecedented access to the cultural products of Africa and 

Black African writers were presented in a positive light by Chinese translators, 

the paratexts to these translations also reveal that the aesthetic or artistic 

elements of their works continued to be overlooked. I also highlight the 

persistence of problematic assumptions regarding Black Africa, its writers and 

its peoples as well as the ethical issues raised by certain aspects of these 

paratexts. 

 

In the final section of chapter five, I link the Black African translation enterprise 

to an attempt at constructing a new transnational identity for Chinese reading 

publics while emphasizing the difficulty of legitimating such an enterprise and 

the embrace of new Third World allies that it signified. I show that, while some 



29 

 

paratextual features of prior decades were still often in evidence, criteria that 

had previously applied to writers from socialist bloc countries could now be 

foregrounded in the paratextual framings of African works in a manner not 

previously possible. In considering the post-Tashkent trajectories of a number 

of Black African works against the backdrop of the CCP’s drive for recognition 

in the Third World, I speculate that the translation of these works may have 

depended on the actions of individual African writers and factors largely 

internal to China rather than the putative Afro-Asian framework exclusively. I 

describe the somewhat innovative approach to the paratextual framings of the 

‘Afro-Asian’ series, published by Writers Press, and highlight interventions that 

countered previous constructions of Black peoples and Africa.  

 

Finally, I contend that Ousmane Sembène was the Black African writer most 

favoured by the Chinese literary establishment during this era. I provide 

evidence of his success and speculate that his speech at the Tashkent 

conference, in which he promulgated ideas about literature and the role of 

writers that resonated strongly with the Maoist theories that the Chinese 

delegation were promoting, may have spurred the adoption of him as an 

ideologically appealing avatar for Black African literature. Moreover, his 

personal biography and works fulfilled the criteria that had previously enabled 

the translation of certain Black writers’ works and embodied the Maoist writer 



30 

 

ideal. Referring primarily to the paratexts to the two translations of his novel O 

Pays, mon beau peuple! (1957), I argue that Sembène’s self-consciously 

Marxist vision made his works suitable for consumption by Chinese readers 

from the point of view of the establishment and allowed for a degree of 

aesthetic commentary not usually seen in paratextual framings of Black 

writings. This, in turn, facilitated the transmission of important information 

about Africa, its peoples and its literatures to Chinese readers. I suggest that the 

paratextual framing of the second of these translations, published by Writers 

Press, is an unprecedented paean to a Black writer in the Chinese literary sphere 

and represents the pinnacle of attempts to reconfigure Chinese perceptions of 

Africa and Blackness during the years of the brief translation surge that ended 

in 1965. This framing may also have facilitated the paratextual innovations in 

the abovementioned Writers Press series.   

 

 

 

 

 

 



31 

 

PART 1: 

The pre-Qing to the late Republican period up to 1936 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



32 

 

Chapter 1 

The Black slave topos: A marker of pre-Mao literary and socio-historical 

constructions of Blackness and Africa 

 

1.1 The shifting discourses of Blackness in China prior to the twentieth 

century and the origins of the Black slave topos 

This chapter is concerned with accounting for the origins, development and 

spread of what I call the Black slave topos, a cluster of stereotypes about Black 

peoples and Africa that would strongly influence the cultural understanding of 

Blackness in twentieth-century China and beyond. I highlight the rapid 

dissemination and pervasiveness of the discourses that constituted this topos by 

the 1920s as they became intrinsic to an emergent modern Chinese racial 

identity. I consider how a number of highly influential Qing intellectuals 

developed a novel racialized framework at the beginning of the century, 

drawing on both foreign racial theories as well as distinctive local notions of 

Blackness. During the Republican era, this framework was adopted, elaborated 

on and institutionalized by a new generation of educators and academics and 

disseminated through the growing publishing sector. As I will show, translation 

played a key role in these processes in two respects. Firstly, intellectuals were 

initially exposed to ideas about race by reading and translating Western books 

about racial or evolutionary theories; they then adapted these ideas for the 



33 

 

Chinese context in their own writings. Secondly, the paratexts to certain 

translations of Western literary works and the works themselves could act as 

conduits for racial ideas. In this regard, I focus on the translators Lin Shu and 

Wei Yi and their deployment of a what I call a politics of indignation in the 

paratextual framing of their translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This entailed 

connecting the plight of the Chinese at home and abroad to that of ‘Black 

slaves’ in the US in order to provoke outrage and inspire action. This move 

appears to have initiated a tendency to invoke such comparisons in a range of 

other situations that had the effect of further entrenching the Black slave topos. 

The final section deals with a few examples of works inspired by Lin Shu and 

Wei Yi’s version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that testify to its enduring impact on 

Chinese society.  

 

Although the use of Blackness as a marker of difference has a long history in 

China, the notion of Blackness as a racial characteristic and its connection with 

Africa and slavery had not yet coalesced in any recognizable sense by the early 

nineteenth century. At a quotidian level within Chinese society, Blackness was 

implicated in the traditional East Asian aesthetic preference for a fairer as 

opposed to a darker skin complexion; fair skin was also a marker of status, 

distinguishing those who had it from the dark-skinned others who performed 

menial work in the sun — but this preference was not applied to foreigners until 



34 

 

later. More importantly, Blackness was one of a vast array of discourses 

employed to ‘other’ foreigners. Prior to the mid-1800s, the concept of race was 

entirely foreign to the world of Chinese discourse; instead, Chinese elites had 

historically expressed a form of cultural chauvinism that disparaged all 

foreigners as a matter of course. From descriptions of imaginary physical and 

moral defects that illustrated their collective inferiority to Chinese people to 

fantastical accounts of their monstrous features that depicted them as less than 

human, those who produced the official discourse in the early nineteenth 

century seemed to engage in what Frank Dikötter calls “nihilation” or “the 

conceptual liquidation of everything inconsistent with official doctrine”, a 

common historical response to a perceived threat.1 Historically, the category of 

Blackness was employed as a dualistic construct to designate an ‘other’ as a 

veritable binary opposite. As Don Wyatt puts it, pre-modern Chinese used 

‘black’ to refer to ethnic groups that they considered utterly “unlike 

themselves”.2 Among the most commonly-used ancient (mostly pejorative) 

terms for such peoples was kunlun. ‘Kunlun slaves’ was later used to designate 

the first identifiably African population in captivity on Chinese soil in eleventh-

century Guangzhou.3 However, while slavery may have become associated with 

certain darker-skinned groups by this period, Blackness as expressed through 

                                           
1 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Type (1793-1895)’. 
2 Wyatt, The Blacks of Premodern China, 3.  
3 Wyatt, 78. 



35 

 

the term kunlun was still not exclusively African and remained unrelated to race 

in the Western anatomical or taxonomical senses.4  

 

Rebecca Karl records that Africa was not understood to be a continent by the 

Chinese until the mid-1800s.5 A recognition of the importance of foreign 

knowledge began to emerge among influential Chinese intellectuals in the mid-

nineteenth century. Although, as Wyatt contends, the extent of China’s relative 

historical isolation has been greatly exaggerated, knowledge of world 

geography was indeed limited during this period.6 Negative stereotypes about 

foreigners persisted in new works that sought to remedy this situation, such as 

those by the Confucian scholars Xu Jiyu and Wei Yuan, with Africa and its 

inhabitants portrayed in exceedingly derogatory terms. In his Yinghuan zhilüe 

(“A brief survey of the maritime circuit”), based on various European and 

Chinese sources, Xu described Africa as a “desperately chaotic place, inhabited 

by retrograde black barbarians”.7 He contended that “its climate and its people 

are the worst of the four continents”, and elaborated on Africans’ supposed 

bestial lifestyle, uncouth eating habits, rampant sexual proclivities, and passivity 

in the face of enslavement. This final point seems to anticipate later Chinese 

                                           
4 Keevak, Becoming Yellow, 128–29. 
5 Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 253. 
6 Wyatt, The Blacks of Premodern China, 131. 
7 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Type (1793-1895)’. 

 



36 

 

reformers’ notions of a subdued ‘Black race’ inhabiting Africa, utterly 

incapable of awakening and liberating itself. Wei Yuan’s Haiguo tuzhi 

(“Treatise on Maritime States”) also portrays Africa as a dismal site for “the 

production of slaves”.8 These texts became influential references for subsequent 

Chinese scholars. Moreover, the older perceptions of Black Africans as slaves 

were subsequently reinforced by the presence of such slaves and their European 

owners at places such as Macau.9 Dikötter emphasizes that the popular press 

was also filled with contempt for places like India and Africa, suggesting that 

these stereotypes extended beyond elite circles. 
10 From the 1850s onwards, 

encounters between Qing envoys travelling abroad and foreigners were also 

increasingly described in negative racial terms by the former and skin colour 

became an increasingly significant means of attempting to classify what were to 

these envoys a seemingly baffling variety of different peoples.11 The accounts 

of these travels (perhaps especially of those to the United States) did little more 

than reinforce the connection between those of African descent and slavery. 

Moreover, “racial anxiety” about being treated in a manner comparable to Black 

slaves was already evident in places such as Spanish-controlled Cuba where, by 

1876, tension had arisen between the slave community and the indentured 

Chinese workers.12 

                                           
8 Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 120. 
9 Karl, 253. 
10 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Type (1793-1895)’. 
11 Dikötter, chap. ‘Race as Type (1793-1895)’. 
12 Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, 184. 



37 

 

Christian missionary writings became the source of much of the new 

information about the outside world, including Africa. Until the mid-nineteenth 

century, Chinese knowledge of Africa remained extremely limited.13 As Karl 

contends, Africa was seen as “the last truly unhistorical space of the modern 

world” by Chinese intellectuals, largely because of “the geographical blackness 

and historical blankness” of missionary accounts of the ‘dark continent’, a view 

reiterated by Shu-mei Shih.14 Prominent missionaries such as Timothy Richard 

and Young John Allen first introduced Western thought to an elite Chinese 

readership on a wider scale in the late nineteenth century.15 As part of this 

infusion of new ‘knowledge’, Chinese students were taught about the colours of 

the different “races of mankind” by the early 1890s in mission schools and 

literature about differentiation on the basis of skin colour was beginning to 

reach Chinese audiences.16 

 

In understanding the trajectory of racialized thinking in China in the first part of 

the twentieth century, 1895 stands as a crucial year. As Karl states, China had 

suffered “a half-century of massive internal rebellions and continued assaults by 

European imperialist powers”, culminating in a humiliating defeat by Japan.17 

                                           
13 Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 253. 
14 Karl, 121; Shih, ‘Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century’, 4. 
15 Wang, ‘From Petitions to Fiction: Visions of the Future Propagated in Early Modern China’, 44–45. 
16 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Type (1793-1895)’. 
17 Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 12. 



38 

 

The sense of pervasive social, economic and political crisis and persistent 

external threats galvanized “a small but disproportionately influential group of 

Chinese educated elites” into attempting to address these problems through “the 

acquisition of knowledge about other places and the incorporation of this new 

knowledge into new structures of knowledge and social practice”. Against this 

backdrop, the shock of defeat to Japan led to agitation for reform and 

intellectual activity became focused around the theme of national survival as 

well as the mobilization of the urban classes in particular through education.18 A 

proliferation of reform-oriented societies and journals as well as a growing 

commercial press and increased literacy would ultimately ensure the rapid 

dissemination of racialized discourses, which were based on an alternative body 

of knowledge that no longer took the Confucian cosmological order as its 

primary reference point. 

 

In this regard, the translation of works introducing evolutionary concepts to 

Chinese readers was to prove pivotal as they provided the theoretical 

underpinning for many of the reformers’ later ideas. The scholar Yan Fu 

translated Evolution and Ethics by T.H. Huxley in 1898 and Herbert Spencer’s 

Study of Sociology in 1903, among a number of other Western sociological and 

political texts. Shouhua Qi explains that Yan Fu’s translations are more 

                                           
18 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Lineage (1895-1903)’. 



39 

 

accurately described as “amalgams of translations, adaptations, and 

commentaries aimed at acculturating [Western thinkers] and making them 

urgently relevant and applicable to the Chinese situation”.19 These publications 

were extremely popular; the Huxley text, for example, ran into thirty print 

editions, reaching educated audiences across the country. Peter Zarrow asserts 

that Yan’s introduction to Chinese readers of “a world of the struggle for 

survival and selection of the fittest — a fearsome place where the unfit 

perished…corresponded to the international world China had been discovering 

since the 1840s” and thus rapidly took root among many Chinese intellectuals.20 

 

As an important precursor of other reformers, Yan Fu’s ideas regarding Africa 

and Blackness warrant further attention. Compelled by a “bleak vision of racial 

competition”, he jettisoned traditional notions of a civilized centre and a 

‘barbarian’ periphery and instead expounded on a racial hierarchy, with 

geographical regions linked to specific races who were in a state of permanent 

conflict.21 He described the ‘Black race’ as the “lowest” of the races, linked 

them specifically to the regions of Africa and the tropics, and called them heinu 

or ‘Black slaves’, a category that was used extensively to designate Africans in 

                                           
19 Qi, Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation, 32. 
20 Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895 - 1949, 60. 
21 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Lineage (1895-1903)’. 



40 

 

general until the 1920s.22 The grafting of slavery onto the racial identity of 

Black Africans is apparent in Yan’s formulation. The meaning of ‘lowest’ is 

also worthy of further examination as it reveals a deeper reason for this 

conflation: the degraded position of Black people was inevitable not only due to 

their evolutionary heritage but also to geographical space which they inhabited. 

Moreover, Yan projected the nightmare of racial extinction onto the darker 

races, warning that the Chinese would also be enslaved by the whites and asking 

rhetorically what prevented the “four hundred million yellows” from meeting 

the same fate as the “brown and black races”.23  

 

The cornerstone of the racialized thinking popularized by the reformers was the 

notion of the Chinese as huangzhong which meant both ‘yellow race’ and 

‘descendants of the Yellow Emperor’.24 Michael Keevak notes that the 

reformers were selective about which aspects of Western racial theory they 

chose to import, rejecting the notion of Chinese being members of the 

‘Mongolian race’ while willingly self-identifying as ‘yellow’ because of its 

                                           
22 Dikötter, ‘Racial Discourse in China: Continuities and Permutations’, 20. During the course of the Ming and 

Qing dynasties, this category emerged to denote “a global black slavery of mainly Africans”. While heinu 

remained the most common, other terms that also combined colour and status included “guinu (…devil slave; 

“devil” here means “foreign black devil”), heigui (…black devil, a term today still used as a racial slur), wugui 

(…darker black devil), heifan (…black barbarian), heisi (…black servant), etc” (see Cheng, Discourses of Race 

and Rising China, 179). Wangguo nu or ‘slave of a lost country’ linked the spectre of colonisation with the fate 

of being enslaved, and the partition of Africa by Western powers, visible on maps of the period, was a chilling 

visual representation of the nightmare which reformers were warning against (see Karl, Staging the World: 

Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 123).  
23 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Lineage (1895-1903)’. 
24 Dikötter, ‘Racial Discourse in China: Continuities and Permutations’, 15. 



41 

 

resonance with the traditional symbolism of the colour.25 Dikötter  argues that 

lineage feuds, that had been a feature of Qing Empire, inspired a vision of racial 

war, in which the racial groups highest in the newly imagined hierarchy, namely 

the ‘yellow’ and the ‘white’, competed for dominance, while the inferior 

‘brown’, ‘red’ and ‘black’ ‘breeds’ faced extinction due to their hereditary 

inadequacy. 26 The historical success of the whites in conquering other races 

was used to provoke anxieties that the ‘yellows’ could also be doomed to racial 

extinction or miezhong, an elaboration on the discourse of miezu or lineage 

extinction.27 The necessary precondition to avert such a fate was the “cohesive 

force of the group (qunli)” which could be fostered by nationalism, a principle 

of which the “barbarian red” and “savage black races” were thought to be 

ignorant.28 The writer Tang Caichang synthesized this racial hierarchy as 

follows: “Yellow and white are wise, red and black are stupid; yellow and white 

are rulers, red and black are slaves; yellow and white are united, red and black 

are scattered”.29 

 

                                           
25 Keevak, Becoming Yellow, 128. 
26 Dikötter, ‘Racial Discourse in China: Continuities and Permutations’, 15–16. 
27  Bonnett records that some Chinese intellectuals, however, strongly rejected the use of terms such as ‘white 

race’ or ‘yellow race’ because of their implicit violation of the Sinocentric world order (see Bonnett, Anti-

Racism, 33). 
28 Dikötter, ‘Racial Discourse in China: Continuities and Permutations’, 17. 
29 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Lineage (1895-1903)’. Italics in the 

quotation are mine. 



42 

 

Yan’s ideas were further developed by, among others, the foremost reformers of 

the day: Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei. In the elaborations of these two 

figures, Blackness remained the negative pole of an increasingly biologically 

inscribed sense of ‘yellowness’, and thus came to embody a doomed hereditary 

and cultural inferiority, the characterizations of which became viscerally 

repugnant. Simultaneously, unable to dismiss whiteness in a similar fashion 

because of the realities of European hegemony, they came to associate the 

‘yellow’ with the ‘white’ as a way of recovering a sense of civilizational 

superiority that had used to have a Confucian underpinning but was now located 

in the bodies of the innately superior ‘yellow’ race. The contradiction inherent 

in acknowledging ‘white’ power while continuing to insist on ‘yellow’ 

superiority was resolved by the seeming aberrant nature of the historical 

moment: ‘yellow’ power would finally either assimilate or subjugate ‘white’ too 

but first it had to avert a ‘Black’ fate.  

 

To Liang’s mind, the ‘yellow’ and white races were what he termed ‘historical’ 

(you lishide zhongzu), destined to determine the course of history, while 

‘blacks’, ‘reds’, and ‘browns’ were ‘ahistorical’ (fei lishide zhongzu); would be 

subjugated by the former group; and ultimately, eliminated.30 Liang consistently 

disparaged the darker races as biologically inferior to whites and ‘yellows’, 

                                           
30 Dikötter, chap. ‘Race as Lineage (1895-1903)’.  



43 

 

calling the Black and brown groups “lazy and stupid”, driven only by instincts 

such as hunger and sex. While Irene Eber records that Liang had noted that 

Blacks were making progress towards greater freedoms and rights after the 

Civil War, both she and Dikötter concur that he appears to have endorsed many 

of the era’s most outrageous stereotypes, even attempting to rationalize 

lynching by citing what he viewed as the pathological sexual obsession with 

white women among Black men in America.31 Arkush and Lee note that Liang, 

like many Chinese visitors to America, seems to have been willing to “adopt the 

prejudices of the dominant group” while retaining a degree of “sympathy for 

victimized blacks”.32 

 

Kang Youwei also believed in an inflexible racial hierarchy and, in his utopian 

vision a future world of racial harmony in his book Datong shu (“The Book of 

Great Unity”), he asserted that whites and ‘yellows’, as the ‘fittest’ of the races, 

would ultimately become indistinguishable while the inferior races should be 

vanquished or mixed with the superior until the “evil seeds” of the latter 

disappear through natural selection.33
 Kang also proposed ways of transforming 

the darker races: dietary change, intermarriage, migration and sterilization.34 

                                           
31 Eber, Voices from Afar, 4–5; Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Lineage 

(1895-1903)’. 
32 Arkush and Lee, Land Without Ghosts, 8. 
33 Shih, ‘Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century’, 3. 
34 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Lineage (1895-1903)’. 



44 

 

Since the appearance of Africans was thought to be repulsive to whites and 

‘yellows’, those who intermarried with them should receive medals for their 

contributions to purifying the race. Kang’s environmental determinism led him 

to suggest that elderly Africans should be relocated to Canada and South 

America while the best of the Africans could be sent to Europe, based on the 

‘observation’ that other races’ complexions lightened or darkened depending on 

the region to which they had migrated. In Kang’s framework, inferiority was 

embedded in Black bodies and his fantasy of future racial harmony revolved 

around the elimination of Blackness through the violence of assimilation rather 

than that of European exterminations. As Hiroko Sakamoto argues, his ideas 

drew openly on eugenicist discourses (derived from Japanese as well as 

Western sources) that would continue to evolve and become increasingly 

popular later in early twentieth-century China.35 

 

Karl implies that Dikötter underestimates the significance of the Chinese use of 

the term tongzhong (‘same kind/race’) which could be invoked as a marker of 

sameness in relation to another people who had lost territory to the imperial 

powers and faced annihilation.36 Dikötter contends that tongzhong was merely a 

temporary and expedient expression of pan-Asianism.37 While it is true that 

                                           
35 Sakamoto, ‘The Cult of “Love and Eugenics” in May Fourth Movement Discourse’, 337. 
36 Karl, ‘Creating Asia’, 1104. 
37 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Lineage (1895-1903)’. 



45 

 

tongzhong could be employed to designate a commonality with a wide range of 

peoples (including ‘darker’ peoples like Indians), neither author mentions this 

as having been extended to Black African peoples. By the early twentieth 

century, it is apparent that Blackness was no longer a fluid or contingent marker 

of difference in Chinese discourse. Instead, it would appear that, under the 

influence of a translated and adapted form of Social Darwinism, Chinese 

national identity came to be located in the bodies of an active and united 

‘yellow race’, inhabiting a historical space, that could in no sense be associated 

with what reforming elites constructed as a passive and disunited Black race, 

inhabiting the ahistorical space of Africa. Indeed, as Dikötter contends, “‘race’ 

thus gradually emerged as the most common symbol of national cohesion, 

permanently replacing more conventional emblems of cultural identity”.38 The 

seeming ‘bias’ against Africa was as much the product of the racialization of 

China’s identity discourse as it was a perception that Africa as a space did not 

produce (and could not produce) the consciousness that enabled its peoples to 

engage in the imagined quintessentially modern activities of uniting and 

struggling for freedom as it had already been overwhelmed by the West and its 

peoples had been enslaved.39 Therefore, despite an “episodic and contradictory 

Chinese self-identification with the ‘oppressed of the world’” between 1895 and 

                                           
38 Dikötter, ‘Racial Discourse in China: Continuities and Permutations’, 16. 
39 See Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 121. 



46 

 

1905, Chinese intellectuals never embraced Black Africans as the ‘same race’, 

any association with latter instead inspiring shame.40  

 

Indeed, the overwhelming determinism of Africa as a geographical space and 

Black skin as a marker of inferiority seemed to preclude any recognition of the 

successful examples of struggles mounted against imperialism by Black 

Africans and therefore denied them the possibility of modernity in the sense 

construed by reformers. Figures such as Samori Touré, the Muslim cleric who 

founded and led an empire that incorporated sections of several present-day 

countries including Guinea and Mali and fiercely resisted the French, were 

seemingly ignored or barely mentioned in the writings of reformers.41 The 

victory of the Abyssinians over Italy in 1896 was alluded to but never 

emphasized.42 Ironically, although the victories of the Boers were initially 

disregarded, seemingly because of an incomplete understanding of who these 

“Africans” were, the Boer War soon became the focus of exhaustive debate 

among reformers and they too were celebrated as an example of a strong and 

united nation from whom the Chinese could learn. Boer oppression of other 

groups in southern Africa was simply ignored.43 Karl explains that ,“among the 

                                           
40 Karl, 200; Shih, ‘Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century’, 4. 
41 Jansen, ‘A Critical Note on “The Epic of Samori Toure”’, 219. 
42 Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 253. Another example 

was perhaps the victory of the Zulus at Isandlwana in 1879. 
43 For a full discussion of the significance of the Boers to the Chinese reformers, see Karl, 117–48. 



47 

 

dozens of essays on the Boers”, local African peoples are largely ignored and 

the few works that mention them “merely figure these peoples as part of a 

landscape that is quickly repressed”.44 Furthermore, the fact that the Boers were 

descended from Europeans figured prominently in the spurious explanations 

offered for their successes and Chinese reformers were adept in recasting their 

struggles in terms that did not violate their emergent racial and geographical 

hierarchy.45 

 

1.2 The emergence of a racialized modern Chinese identity and the 

consolidation of the Black slave topos during the Republican era (1911–

1936) 

Frank Dikötter argues that concept of race had become intrinsic to Chinese 

identity by the end of the Republican era. He has made a singular contribution 

in uncovering racial discourses in scientific and educational literatures that were 

often intended for popular consumption.46 The spread of such discourses was 

facilitated by the emergence of a new educated elite who replaced the traditional 

gentry in especially the coastal metropolises and for whom science, rather than 

Confucian cosmology, was the principal explanatory framework for the ‘truth’ 

that was “encoded in nature”. Their beliefs were characterized by the 

                                           
44 Karl, 130. 
45 Shih, ‘Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century’, 4. 
46 Dikötter, ‘Racial Discourse in China: Continuities and Permutations’, 18–21. 



48 

 

construction of human biology as “the epistemological foundation of the social 

order” and the notion that truth could be extracted through scientific 

investigations into different population groups through the lenses of fields such 

as genetics and embryology.  The dissemination of these beliefs was also 

promoted by an expansion of the publishing industry and literacy, as well as the 

growing use of the vernacular language in books and periodicals, which made 

knowledge accessible to a wider than ever audience and entrenched the new 

broader scientific orientation.  

 

The racial hierarchies that scholars such as Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and Kang 

Youwei had first adumbrated were thus not contradicted in any meaningful 

sense and indeed began to be legitimized by the new elites. As one of the 

cornerstones of this increasingly prevalent view, race had found its way into 

school textbooks by 1920. As Dikötter’s extract from a primary school text 

reveals, school children were being exposed to many of the notions that the 

Qing reformers had already popularized: 

Mankind is divided into five races. The yellow and white races are relatively strong and 

intelligent. Because the other races are feeble and stupid, they are being exterminated by the 

white race. Only the yellow race competes with the white race. This is so-called evolution… 



49 

 

Among the contemporary races that could be called superior, there are only the yellow and 

the white races. China is the yellow race…47 

The ongoing centrality of Social Darwinism and racialized thinking is evident in 

the above statements, as is the persistence of extinction discourse, a feature of 

many strains of racialized thought in the West from the Victorian era onwards. 

More significantly, the ‘yellow race’ is described as on a par and ‘competing’ 

with the white race, hinting at the growing political utility of race. Dikötter  

states that “racial discourse was a dominant practice which cut across most 

political positions”.48 It readily lent itself to appeals to a cultural sense of 

belonging based on “presumed immutable links of blood” and defining in- and 

out-groups as well as providing a relatively stable set of biological principles for 

explaining the social differences between various groups. 

 

Unlike the previous generation of intellectuals, however, the post-Qing 

generation of “cultural intermediaries” including “social reformers, professional 

writers, medical researchers, [and] university professors” were often trained in 

Western academic fields and sought to consolidate racial categories through 

appeals to science itself .49 The validity of race having achieved broad-based 

acceptance among these intellectuals, many became interested in establishing 

                                           
47 Dikötter, 21. 
48 Dikötter, 22. 
49 Dikötter, 19. 



50 

 

the biological boundaries between the Chinese and other groups.50 Studies on 

such topics as the higher cranial weight of Chinese brains as compared with 

those of specimens from other races as an indicator of the degree of civilization 

or references to the excavation of Peking Man as evidence of the ancientness of 

the Chinese race were often cited as proof of its superiority.51 In addition, blood 

purity and the absence of body hair would be construed by certain scholars as 

features of the Chinese that clearly distinguished them from other groups. An 

emphasis on racial purity and the persistent fear of degeneration led to a 

widespread belief in the importance and efficacy of eugenics; a proliferation of 

educational literature introduced the principles of this field to lay readers and 

injunctions to the individual to take responsibility for the preservation and 

health of the race were common.52 

 

Implicit in the attempt to stake out these boundaries is the notion that 

‘Chineseness’ was “rooted in every part of the body” and that cultural 

differences with other peoples could therefore also be explained through 

references to racialized bodies.53 This served to heighten a sense of contrast 

with other groups and therefore of the distinctiveness of the in-group as well as 

                                           
50 Dikötter mentions that, although some intellectuals contested aspects of the dominant racial paradigm, no 

meaningful intellectual challenge was seemingly ever mounted against it. 
51 Dikötter, ‘Racial Discourse in China: Continuities and Permutations’, 19–20. 
52 Dikötter, 25. 
53 Dikötter, 20. 



51 

 

to legitimate and intensify ‘othering’. Black Africans in particular were depicted 

in an extremely derogatory manner in writings that now had the growing aura of 

scientific authority. Dikötter quotes several scientific texts of the period that 

presented Blacks as backward, malodorous and animal-like physically, 

sometimes even classifying them along with primates; in addition, their 

intelligence was derided as inferior.54 One such example was “a popular 

zoology textbook first published in 1916” that stated that “the ‘inferior races’ 

(liedeng zhongzu) had a facial index similar to that of the orang-utan” and 

classified the “black slave” in “the gorilla branch”. 

 

Dikötter provides a number of other examples of this type of stereotyping in his 

full-length work The Discourse of Race in Modern China but is also careful to 

point out that these notions were also “pervasive and influential” in the West 

between the world wars and beyond.55 Despite the addition of seemingly precise 

and objective details to these discussions, based on various types of ‘scientific 

measures’, it is clear that the constructs of Blacks and Blackness had not shifted 

substantially since the late Qing era. Indeed, the persistently negative traits that 

were attributed to Black Africans perhaps hint at their continuing function as 

                                           
54 Dikötter, 20–21. 
55 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Species (1915-1949)’. 



52 

 

constituting a negative racial polarity that enabled Chinese-ness to ‘shine’ by 

contrast, although other groups could be disparaged in a similar fashion. 

 

Moreover, the proliferation of these ‘scientific’ ideas, together with those 

circulating in the influential literary realm as I will reveal in the next few 

sections, could impact other areas of social concern. For example, a connection 

between the situation of Chinese women and the enslavement of Blacks in the 

United States was made as early as 1907 by He Yinzhen, an early anarchist and 

feminist thinker, who claimed that slave girls in China served under conditions 

of “harsh industriousness” just as the American Blacks did but that the 

motivation for slavery in the Chinese case was not primarily for profit.56 As 

evolutionary and eugenicist discourses gained momentum among intellectuals, 

the role of women as “mothers” of the nation as well as their being essential to 

the “strength” and “intelligence” of the race began to spread and the struggle of 

Chinese women against the old patriarchal order was increasingly foregrounded. 

In 1912 (the year after the fall of the Qing), a statement in a women’s journal 

noted that Chinese women had, for thousands of years, been “submerged in a 

sea of suffering, having resigned ourselves to a state of obedience much like 

that of black African slaves”.57 Sakamoto suggests that such comparisons show 

                                           
56 Liu, Karl, and Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, 76. 
57 Sakamoto, ‘The Cult of “Love and Eugenics” in May Fourth Movement Discourse’, 350–51. 



53 

 

not only “a strong consciousness of race” but an anger at being treated in a 

manner comparable to Black slaves, thereby marshalling a similar argument to 

that pursued in the previous decade when the juxtaposition of Chinese workers 

with Black slaves (which I will discuss in subsequent sections) was intended to 

provoke a sense of racial indignation (what I call a politics of indignation). 

Sakamoto contends that a new concept of motherhood was constructed “with 

the aim of creating intelligent, healthy, and independent national subjects” who 

were clearly distinguishable from the Black slaves who had showed no agency 

in their own liberation.58 

 

As mentioned earlier, revolutionary or Social Darwinist discourses in China 

were not simply replicas of Western discourses but rather somewhat hybridized. 

Prescientific or cultural concepts thus continued to persist in what were 

presented as ‘scientific’ texts. I have already mentioned that ‘Black slave’ was a 

distinctive category of slave in the Chinese language. Whereas slavery as a 

practice could be legitimated through references to ‘science’ in the West, I 

argue that ‘Black slave’ came to be treated as an a priori ontological category in 

the Chinese context; the validity of assigning slavish attributes to Black people 

did not generally require justification even if slavery as an institution was not 

endorsed. Dikötter provides a number of further examples in which ‘slave’ 

                                           
58 Sakamoto, 368. 



54 

 

became part of scientific categories, such as Gu Shoubai’s odd categorization of 

the “‘black slave race’ (heinu zhongzu), ‘little black slave race’ (xiao heinu 

zhongzu), and a ‘standard black slave race’ (zhun heinu zhongzu) in his popular 

introductions to human geography” and Gong Tingzhang’s captioning of the 

image of an African in a suit as a “black slave from Africa”.59 Dikötter suggests 

that Blackness had remained the mark of the slave since ancient times and that 

such references were widespread until the end of the 1920s. He therefore 

appears to be speculating that a potential reason for the curious persistence of 

this term could be its historical usage, in much the same way as the clearly 

derogatory ‘dwarf slave’ continued to be applied to the Japanese. While it is 

true that the use of the term ‘Black slave’ appears to have emerged before the 

late Qing and that Yan Fu himself had referred to this group, I suggest that this 

is perhaps only a partial explanation. I argue that reasons for the curious 

persistence of the Black slave topos must be sought not only in the continuing 

function of Blackness as a negative racial polarity against which the Chinese 

race may be shown to be superior. Rather, the addition of the ‘slave’ component 

made Blackness, as Karl puts it, “the metaphorical and literal expression for the 

depths to which any people could sink”.60 As Karl suggests, Blackness became 

the repository of ‘slavishness’; the slave basically lacked the “consciousness” 

that “now divided the civilized from the uncivilized”, “the historical from the 

                                           
59 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, chap. ‘Race as Species (1915-1949)’. 
60 Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 123. 



55 

 

unhistorical” and ultimately “people” from “slaves”. In this respect, the ‘Black 

slave race’ formulation is not only descriptor of the physical characteristics of a 

people considered inferior but an inherent negation of their potential to awaken 

politically, unify and enter history as modern subjects. 

 

1.3 The Black slave topos in the literary sphere: The impact of Uncle Tom’s 

Cabin in China 

1.3.1 ‘Made to conform’: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Lin Shu and Wei Yi’s 

politics of indignation 

It is not surprising that literature itself would become a conduit for racial ideas, 

given racialized thinking’s displacement of traditional thought, and that 

politically motivated translators would feel entitled to appropriate aspects of 

foreign literature in order to further their agendas against the backdrop of 

ongoing perceived crises. The most influential of these translators during this 

period was Lin Shu, responsible for the Chinese rendering of Uncle Tom’s 

Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and widely acknowledged as a ‘path-breaking’ 

figure in the field of literary translation and the development of modern Chinese 

literature.61 Lin’s selection of particular texts is revealing; Stowe’s book, as will 

be shown, was an overtly political choice, but a similar reformist impulse also 

                                           
61 Baker, ‘Translated Images of the Foreign in the Early Works of Lin Shu (1852-1924) and Pearl S. Buck 

(1892-1973): Accommodation and Appropriation’, 37–39. 



56 

 

seems to have motivated his persistent interest in the works of Henry Rider 

Haggard. Inclined, as his contemporaries were, towards viewing his readers as 

extremely impressionable and eager that they should imbibe the desired 

interpretation of books such as Stowe’s, Lin also chose to shape their 

perceptions through the addition of paratexts. These were quite prescriptive at 

times and saturated in the racialized discourse of his reformer peers. At stake 

was the question of who the Chinese were and who they should be from the 

perspective of Lin and other reformers. In brief, were they content to be aging 

and stoic ‘Uncle Toms’ or were they willing to rise up like the character George 

Harris and flog their tormentors? This question hints at the deployment of what 

I term a politics of indignation which aimed at arousing the patriotic spirit of the 

Chinese reader through highlighting that his or her compatriots were being 

forced to submit to treatment that a race considered inferior had suffered. 

 

Although less overtly political than his reformer peers, the erudite Lin was also 

moved by the Japanese defeat of China, and joined Kang and Liang in 

protesting the terms of the peace treaty as well as urging for reform.62 Like 

them, Lin was a royalist who was in favour of a constitutional monarchy for 

China, a position which, in addition to his cultural conservatism, gradually 

transformed him into an anachronism in the eyes of later, more radical 

                                           
62 Qi, Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation, 40. 



57 

 

intellectuals.63 He is now principally remembered as having introduced a new 

generation of Chinese readers to 213 pieces of Western literature.64As Margaret 

Baker notes, Lin and his collaborators were the first to enable a “cross-cultural 

literary encounter” between Qing intellectuals and foreign works; the success of 

his many translation projects greatly raised the status of fiction in China.65 Qi 

notes that, although Lin’s translations were extremely popular among the 

educated elite, his choice of works for translation and his style were criticized 

by later writers, many of whom had grown up reading his works. 

 

My claim that Lin Shu’s translation oeuvre was a vehicle for the dissemination 

of racialized discourses is supported by Wanlong Gao’s assertion that Lin’s 

ideas about the power of fiction also resonated strongly with Liang and Yan’s 

and that he “turned their ideas into reality”.66 Moroever, Leo Tak-Hung Chan 

speculates that even Lin’s translations of Aesop’s fables (with the co-operation 

of Yan Fu’s sons) may have been intended to spread evolutionary ideas among 

the Chinese reading public “and to urge them to take action before the country 

got devoured like the lamb by the wolf”.67 The prefaces and postscripts to his 

translations in particular highlight his belief in the appeal as well as the 

                                           
63 Gao, ‘Recasting Lin Shu A Cultural Approach to Literary Translation’, 110. 
64 Kwan, ‘Rejuvenating China’, 34. 
65 Baker, ‘Translated Images of the Foreign in the Early Works of Lin Shu (1852-1924) and Pearl S. Buck 

(1892-1973): Accommodation and Appropriation’, 36. 
66 Gao, ‘Recasting Lin Shu A Cultural Approach to Literary Translation’, 121–22. 
67 Chan, ‘Liberal Versions: Late Qing Approaches to Translating Aesop’s Fables’, 72. 



58 

 

educational value of fiction, in the importance of the content and form of 

Western novels at a time when they were initially seen as inferior to Chinese 

literature, and in the role of literature in “national political success or failure”. 

As Baker contends, the hope for poli