This dissertation traces the intimate tensions between Blackness and Chineseness in modern Chinese literature and culture of the long twentieth century. It argues that the discourse of Blackness in modern China is a product of racial translation that mediates global regimes of racial knowledge and power and historically specific articulations of Chinese modernity. Defined as the translingual, transcultural, and transmedial practices that embed and reconfigure existing ethno-racial categories, Chinese translations of Blackness render racializing figures of Africa and peoples of African descent legible, accessible, and indispensable to being modern and Chinese in the twentieth century. Figures such as the enslaved, the anti-colonial revolutionary, the railroad builder, and the border-crossing lover become prominent tropes through which desires and anxieties toward nation-building, socialist revolution, industrial development, and transnational intimacy are channeled and unleashed. Examining translated literature, drama, poetry, reportage, autobiography, television drama, and more, this study reveals the ways in which the racial discourse of Blackness affects the thematic concerns, generic conventions, formal structures, and affective tensions of a wide range of cultural forms and genres across the centers and margins of modern Chinese culture. Bringing race theories, Black Studies, and postcolonial critique to bear on underexamined sites and scenes of racial modernity, it sheds light on the ways in which modern Chinese thinkers, writers, and artists became implicated as they sought to challenge existing racial orders, thereby leaving behind a complex legacy that prefigures lived experiences of Sino-Black encounters and South-South relationality.