Ghana’s March 6, 1957 independence celebrations in Accra drew prominent leaders from the major Cold War powers, including US Vice President Richard Nixon and Chinese Vice Premier Nie Rongzhen. Scholars have used Nixon’s visit to explore American diplomacy and the relationship between race and foreign policy. But what—if anything—can Nie’s visit tell us about China’s initial engagements with a decolonizing Africa? Drawing on Ghanaian, Chinese, and US records, this talk uses Nie’s participation in Ghana’s independence celebrations to examine how diplomacy, race, and ideology shaped the People’s Republic of China’s initial understanding of postcolonial Africa.
Joshua Hill is an associate professor of Chinese history at Ohio University. He has written on Chinese elections from the Qing to the PRC, the place of “people’s democracy” in the history of global democratic thought, and local declarations of independence in early Republican China. He is working on a book about Liang Qichao’s 1903 journey across North America and hopes one day to write a history of betel nut as a commodity.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History.
