From Mao Zedong to Martin Luther King Jr., China has a long and complex history of interaction with African American movements for equal rights. OSU Department of History PhD candidate Melvin Barnes Jr. and Princeton University’s James Watson-Krips discuss Barnes’ research on the history of Chinese-African American interactions from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter in a new interview.

Barnes discusses his dissertation titled "Revolution and Race: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Chinese Imagination." His work uses the lens of China's own domestic policy to examine the historical links between the African American and Chinese populations during their respective periods of revolution. Barnes and Watson-Krips also go on to discuss the domestic and international tensions that have arisen in the present age, and their connections with the struggle for liberation. 

The full interview can be streamed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEmFFVAImMc&feature=youtu.be

Special thanks to: Melvin Barnes, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Ohio State University and James Watson-Krips, PhD Student, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University. Sponsored by: The Institute for Chinese Studies, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, Department of History.

Video production by Laura Seeger, Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching. Audio production by Paul Kotheimer, College of Arts & Sciences Academic Technology Services.