“Sound of Friendship”: Music and Music Iconography in 20th-Century Africa–China Relations

China’s engagement with the world is shaped by how China understands itself, the world, and its place in the world. One way of framing this understanding since the 20th century has been through constructing friends and foes. Drawing on the framework of friendship conceptualized in cold war China’s discourses of internationalism, I explore material and cultural productions as sites of knowledge production and circulation in China, where ideas of friendship or otherwise were produced and circulated. This paper asks what possibilities for knowledge production the engagement with friendship can afford. I focus on the social lives of media products and how they contribute to understandings of Africa in modern China, and I argue that knowledge production and circulation of Africa contributes to how China has understood itself since the 20th century when China sought to (re)define itself and its place in the world. I pursue this argument by tracing the life and works of Zhu Mingying­­, an influential Chinese folk musician in the 20th century who situates her work within the framework of friendship, the circulation of her artform into twenty-first century classrooms, and its implications for transcultural learning in modern China.