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Home , Alain Badiou, Anarchism in China, Anchee Min, Liang Shiyi, Liu Shifu, Liu Shipei

Translating in Twentieth-Century and

Diana King

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree

of Doctor of

in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2017

© 2017

Diana King

All reserved

ABSTRACT

Translating Revolution in Twentieth-Century China and France

Diana King

In “Translating Revolution in Twentieth-Century China and France,” I examine how the two countries translated each ’s during critical moments of political and cultural crisis (the , the (1919), the

Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and May 1968 in France), and subsequently (or simultaneously), how that knowledge was mobilized in practice and shaped the historical contexts in which it was produced. Drawing upon a broad range of discourses including political journals, travel narratives, films and in French, English and Chinese, I argue that translation served as a key site of knowledge production, shaping the formulation of various political and cultural projects from constructing a Chinese to articulating women’s rights to thinking about radical emancipation in an era of .

While there have been isolated studies on the influence of the French Revolution in early twentieth-century China, and the impact of the Chinese on the development of French and French theory in the sixties, there have been few studies that examine the circulation of revolutionary ideas and practices across multiple historical moments and cultural contexts. In addition, the tendency of much current scholarship to focus exclusively on the texts of prominent French or Chinese overlooks the vital role played by translation, and by non-elite thinkers, writers, students and migrant workers in the cross-fertilization of revolutionary discourses and practices.

Given that potential solutions to social and political problems associated with were debated through the recurring circulation of translations (and ) of ideas such as “”, “natural rights,” “women’s rights,” and so on, I examine: who was translating whom, and for what purposes? What specific concepts and values are privileged, and why? Taking translation and translingual contact as my point of departure, I illuminate how French and Chinese intermediaries envisioned and attempted to create a just under fraught historical conditions.

Table of Contents

ABBREVIATIONS ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

DEDICATION ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER

1. The Sword of Revolution: Translating Change in Late Qing and Early Republican China ...... 25

2. La Chinoise I : Translating ...... 87

3. La Chinoise II: Translating Thought and the Cult of Mao ...... 126

4. Revolution in Retrospect: The Francophone Cultural Revolution ...... 176

CONCLUSION ...... 222

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 225

ABBREVIATIONS

CCP Chinese CPSU Communist Party of the Union

CVB Comités Viêtnam de base

ECCO European Chinese Communist Organizations

ECCYL European Chinese Communist Youth League

ENS École normale supérieure

GMD Guomindang

GP Gauche prolétarienne

GPCR Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

PCF Parti communiste français

PCMLF Parti communiste marxiste-léniniste de France

PLA People’s Liberation Army

PRC People’s Republic of China

ROC Republic of China ()

UCFML Union communiste français marxiste-léniniste

UEC Union des étudiants communistes français

UJCml Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is the unlikely outgrowth of a research project undertaken in

Paris almost nine years ago. At the time, I was exploring the relationship between exile and artistic creation, as well as the negotiation of an identity situated between cultures, in the work of François Cheng, a Franco-Chinese writer and Zao Wou-ki, a Franco-Chinese painter. As I researched and wrote about exile, I found myself in the odd position of literally suspended between (English, Chinese), between countries (U.S.,

China), and between cultures. I found myself in , trying, in a way, to reconcile my own dual cultural heritage via French as an intermediary. It was through French that I first found myself gravitating towards Chinese, which was, for some time, a lost heritage.

These initial interests in questions of exile and cross-cultural exchange, through many enriching workshops, seminars, and conversations at Columbia, were productively broadened to include an interrogation of the politics of translation, the historical asymmetry in power between cultures, and the ways in which that unevenness continues to shape cross-cultural encounters, and the world we live in. I am deeply grateful to

Professors Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Madeleine Dobie, Lydia Liu, and the late Philip

Watts for their belief in and support of my research, even in its most inchoate forms.

Their inspiring scholarship, models of teaching and writing, and guidance were instrumental to its conceptualization and development. This project slowly unfolded, taking many twists and turns, and it could not been completed without, especially, the unflagging support and philosophical interventions of my advisor, Professor Diagne, the generous encouragement and thoughtful reading of Professor Dobie, and the theoretical

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rigor of Professor Liu, who introduced me to many new “worlds of thinking.” I would also like to thank Professors Etienne Balibar and Brent Edwards for generously agreeing to participate in the defense. And I am grateful to Professor Edwards for his introductory comparative literature seminar, which in many ways, helped set the stage for my comparative work.

A warm thanks to Professors Madeleine Dobie, Emmanuelle Saada and

Joanna Stalnaker for organizing and leading dissertation workshops, and my fellow graduate students in those workshops for commenting on different stages of this project. Many thanks to Yurou Zhong, Jenny Rhodes, Lindsay Van Tine, and

Johanna Magin for their camaraderie, stimulating conversations, and for reading or talking through various parts of this study with me.

Finally, I owe much gratitude to my oldest friends and family for their warm support, and my partner for his understanding and patience through the long final stages of dissertation writing.

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DEDICATION

In memory of Philip Watts (1961-2013), and George Moskos (1949-2011),

Professors of French, whose inspiring teaching, scholarly example, and sense of humor will always be warmly remembered.

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INTRODUCTION

Translating Revolution

Evoking the of the French Revolution, once prophesied:

When in their imminent flight across Asia our European reactionaries will ultimately arrive at the wall of China, at the gates that lead to the very stronghold of arch-reaction and arch-, who knows if they will not find there in the inscription: République chinoise Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.1

Marx’s paradoxical vision of a walled off, archly conservative Chinese empire transformed into a republic founded upon the French revolutionary ideals of , equality, and fraternity would prove oddly prescient, if inaccurate and historically deterministic. Writing in the aftermath of the European Revolutions of 1848, the First

Opium War (1839-1842), and the start of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), Marx predicted that the forces of capitalist led by the British would “batter down all Chinese walls” and lead to a bourgeois, democratic République chinoise. For a brief period in the early 1850s, he viewed China with its struggles against European imperialism and civil war as the site of a revolt with worldwide significance. On the one hand, this positioning of China as the epicenter of a global revolutionary revival would seem to go against the grain of Marx’s well-known depiction of China as a pre-capitalist land “vegetating in the teeth of time.” On the other, it reinforces Marx’s notion of

1 “Revue,” in Karl Max and Fresderick Engels, Werke. Berlin, 1964, 7: 222. Cited in Maurice Meisner, “The French Revolution and Chinese ” in The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution, Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel, eds. Princeton and : Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 177-194, p. 177.

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inexorable historical progress driven by capitalist imperialism, and his paternalistic image of China as socioeconomically backwards and incapable of moving into modern history on its own.2 In other words, Marx’s description of nineteenth-century China is a prime example of what Spivak and the Subaltern Studies group have criticized as the insertion of non-Western histories into a “great modes-of-production narrative.”3 As laudatory as it appears on the surface, Marx’s commentary inscribes China within a history of colonialism that “is generally defined as a change from semi-feudalism into capitalist subjection.”4 Framing change as a positive transition from feudalism to – and one could add, from tradition to modernity, from “East” to “West” – this narrative has been productively challenged in recent decades by postcolonial paradigms emphasizing confrontation rather than transition in studies of the encounter between “East” and

“West.” As I discuss below, we might add to the paradigm of confrontation – at least in the case of China and France – a certain amount of complicity and collaboration in cross- cultural exchanges.

Although the failed Taiping Rebellion did not “throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of … political revolutions

2 As Meisner has argued, Marx was writing at a time (the early 1850s) when he was inclined to look for the seeds of revolution in less economically developed countries, and when he was passing through what some have called his “Jacobin-Blanquist aberration.” He was also “filled with moral outrage over the atrocities” the British committed in China during and after the Opium war. With the failure of the Taiping Rebellion, he would abandon his avowal of China as the site of a revolutionary revival, but continue to see it as compelled to a bourgeois-type revolution via Western capitalist imperialism. For Marx, as for Hegel, China had no history outside of the West. Ibid, p. 177-178.

3 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 2006.

4 Ibid, p. 197.

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on the [European] continent,”5 and the 1911 Xinhai Revolution hardly led to a bourgeois democracy, Marx’s anticipatory linking of the French and Chinese Revolutions would be realized, first in 1911, and throughout the twentieth century as social, political and cultural crises in both China and France led each to seek inspiration in the revolutionary ideals of its “Republican sister.”6 In the early 1900s, the slogan “Liberty, equality, fraternity” was a proclaimed goal of Sun Zhongshan’s (Sun Yat-sen’s) revolutionary

Tongmenghui (Alliance Society), which later became the nationalist Guomindang; universal brotherhood, liberty, and equality also served as the guiding principles of other influential radical movements and groups, notably of Francophile Chinese anarchists.

Between 1919 and 1921, an anarchist educational program sent thousands of Chinese youth to France in a program that combined study and labor. Some of these sojourners, including and , would become future Chinese Communist

Party leaders. As a number of scholars have shown, the Chinese Revolution in its multiple stages (republican, peasant, communist, cultural) drew inspiration from the

French Revolution and the Paris .7 It has also been argued that the French

5 Karl Marx, “Revolution in China and Europe,” New York Tribune, 14 June 1853.

6 France and China were fêted in Paris as “les deux Républiques soeurs” by French and Chinese diplomats at a celebration for the newly founded Republic of China in 1912.

7 See Zhang Zhilian, ed. China and the French Revolution: Proceedings of the International Conference, , 18-21 March 1989. : Pergamon Press, 1990; Feng Ziyou, Scattered Historical Materials of the Revolution, Vol. II: The Revolutionary League Branches in Shanghai and ; Gao Yihan, “General Situation of Changes Among Young Students of Province Before and After the 1911 Revolution” in Reminiscences of the 1911 Revolution, and Li Xiping, “A Chronicle of the ” in Reminiscences of the 1911 Revolution; John Bryan Starr, “Revolution in Retrospect: The Through Chinese Eyes” in The China Quarterly, Vol. 49, Issue 49, 1972, p. 106-125. Pro- Revolution political journals such as Minbao, Qingnian, Xin Qingnian, Guominbao, and Tide published articles that drew parallels between eighteenth-century France and twentieth-century China, and espoused French revolutionary values. Many of these journals were published in , where Chinese intellectuals and students were first exposed to histories of the French Revolution in Japanese translation. 3

Revolution itself grew out of the Enlightenment; and for many Enlightenment thinkers, ancient China served as a model of an ideal, moral secular society. In effect, France and

China have long served as attractive alternative social, political, and cultural models for each other during periods of political and social crisis.8 Over a century after Marx’s conjecture, French Maoists seeking to challenge Western imperialism and revive the

French revolutionary legacy in the 1960s would consider Maoist China, and especially

Mao’s Cultural Revolution to be the of a .

The pronounced and long-standing mutual fascination between France and China raises a number of questions. Beyond the obvious question why China and France?9, one might ask: how much of what Chinese Communists took to be distinctly French revolutionary ideals were actually French interpretations of traditional Chinese thought?

And in what ways may French Maoism have recycled Chinese interpretations of French revolutionary ideals? These questions point to the impossibility of fixing a single point of origin. But we should be wary of taking them too literally and avoid the temptation to evaluate degrees of influence, or focus too much on cultural hybridity. The former misses the point, and the latter has already been productively argued10, or shown to be less

8 Marx’s oscillation between praise of China’s revolutionary potential and censure of her backwardness encapsulates the long history of Western, and certainly French perceptions of China from the Jesuits to the Maoists. As French missionary Évariste-Régiste Huc remarked in 1854, European views of China tended to “swing erratically from admiration to condemnation depending on the individual’s own particular political and philosophical concerns.” In Bailey, Paul. " and : French Attitudes toward China in the Early Twentieth Century." History of European Ideas Vol. 14.No. 6 (1992): 817-37, p. 817. Cf. Huc, Évariste-Régiste. L’Empire chinois. Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1992.

9 I do not want to downplay the importance of this question – it will be addressed in this introduction, as well as in each chapter, as the France-China relationship evolves throughout – but it is not the central concern of this project.

10 To a certain extent, as has argued, given that cultures do not exist and have never existed in isolation, languages and cultures are inextricably hybrid. On the linkages between ancient Greece and 4

effective in analyzing cross-cultural exchanges in the case of non-European languages.11

For me, the more crucial point these questions raise concerns the interwovenness of the two revolutions and their representations across space, time, and languages. once remarked that the Chinese Cultural Revolution was possibly “the last revolution,” 12 the final heir of “the first revolution” in a historical sequence that began in 1789. He was speaking, I believe, of a certain – the idea of a truly free and equal democratic society inaugurated by the French Revolution, and expressed to a certain extent in the

Déclaration des droits de l’homme, but which has yet to be fully realized. Related notions such as “democracy,” “natural rights,” “human rights,” and “women’s rights” would emerge time and again under fraught historical conditions, be suppressed by reactionary forces, and reemerge. In the case of China in the twentieth century, these notions were discussed and debated, translated and retranslated in a newly burgeoning and politically radical press in an effort to save China (jiuguo) from foreign incursions and her perceived

earlier Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations, see Martin Bernal. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. I. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. In the case of ancient China, numerous scholars have demonstrated that Chinese dynasties have long borrowed terms and concepts from Central Asian, Arabic, and Northern Asian sources; in particular, the translation of Buddhist texts during the Six Dynasties period introduced a large number of Sanskrit terms into Chinese. The work of linguists of modern Chinese have shown that it is composed of foreign, especially Japanese loanwords and neologisms to a remarkable degree, resulting in a near total reconfiguration of the language and rendering nearly obsolete. Mikhail Bahktin and Homi Bhabha, among others, have persuasively established the hybridization of cultures and languages in the context of, respectively, the European Renaissance and post-colonial diasporas. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity in The Location of Culture (1994), for example, points to diasporic situations where hybridized colonial dialects “return to caricature the presumed integrity of the language of the colonizer.” See Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity, China, 1900-1937. Stanford: Press, 1995, xvi.

11 As Lydia Liu argues, while Bhabha’s notion of cultural hybridity has done much productive work in challenging the opposition between Self and Other in postcolonial contexts, it does not adequately account for cross-cultural exchanges between the “West” and non-colonized but nevertheless subjugated peoples. See ibid.

12 Bruno Bosteels, trans. “The Cultural Revolution: the Last Revolution?” in the special issue ‘Alain Badiou and the Cultural Revolution,’ positions, vol. 13, no. 3, 2005, p. 481-513. Originally published as La révolution culturelle: la dernière révolution? Paris: Les conférences du Rouge-Gorge, 2002.

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weaknesses on the world stage. Revolution was one possible solution (among others) to the problems posed by modernity, which, for the purposes of this study, I define broadly as a set of values, beliefs, and material and social conditions structured by the forces of capitalist imperialism, and linked to the Enlightenment project of liberating humankind from superstition, and enriching everyday life through (scientific) knowledge and reason.13 Modernity, as Habermas has claimed, is inevitably an “unfinished project” due to its many internal contradictions. The largest of these contradictions, according to the intellectual historian and literary critic Wang , is the contradiction between democracy (“understood as a broad social politics”) and modernization (“defined exclusively as economic developmentalism”).14 Throughout this study, I analyze how revolution and rights were translated and mobilized to address the manifold problems – political, social, cultural, ethical, existential – faced by China and France in the twentieth century as they attempted to articulate and put into practice new, more egalitarian relationships between individuals as well as between states.

To that end, a more productive set of questions might be: how did the French and

Chinese Revolutions inflect each other throughout the twentieth century in response to the crises and contradictions of modernity? What values, concepts, and discourses did

French and Chinese intellectuals and diverse social groups privilege, and why? How were privileged concepts, categories, and discourses – often presumed to be universal –

13 As a contested concept, modernity has variously been defined as a project (Habermas), a temporality (Hegel), an attitude (Foucault), an ideology, and so forth. In offering this capacious – and doubtless, reductive – definition, I am by no means attempting to provide a standard description.

14 See Rebecca Karl’s Foreword in Wang, Hui. The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity. , Brooklyn: Verso, 2009, 2011.

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translated cross-culturally under highly unequal historical and geopolitical conditions?

Taking seriously the term’s Latin etymology – “to carry over, bring across” – what happens when concepts travel from one language to another? Who was translating whom, and for what purposes? What form did these translations take, and how did their forms both limit and enable their impact on existing historical conditions? What role does translation play, as Lydia Liu puts it, “in the construction of power between so-called

First and Third worlds?”15 In the following chapters, I examine how France and China translated each other’s revolutions during critical moments of national crisis in the twentieth century, and subsequently (or simultaneously), how that knowledge was mobilized in practice, and shaped the historical contexts in which it was produced.

Drawing upon a broad range of discourses, including political journals, travel narratives, films and novels in French, English and Chinese, I argue that translation served as a key site of knowledge production, shaping the formulation of various political and cultural projects from constructing a strong, sovereign nation (Chapter One) to articulating women’s rights (Chapter Two) to thinking about radical emancipation in an era of decolonization (Chapter Three), and finally, to reframing revolution in a transnational, post-socialist age (Chapter Four).

Before discussing in greater detail the theoretical framework of this project, it may be useful to address the question: why China and France? While has more obvious connections to France due to French colonial history in Indochina, there is a rich and underexplored history of literary, cultural, and political exchanges between China

15 Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity, China, 1900- 1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 21.

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and France, particularly in the tumultuous twentieth century. Of course, early twentieth- century Chinese radicals were reading about Japanese, Russian, American, and other

European revolutions in addition to the French Revolution, and leftists around the world, not just in France, considered themselves Maoists in the 1960s and 70s. Additionally, one might raise the critique that focusing on China and France reinforces the China versus the

West/ dyad that typically dominates scholarship on China’s encounters with the world. The two main criticisms about the China-West/Japan emphasis are that 1) it tends to create a semi-feudal/capitalist, traditional/modern dichotomy in which China is seen as needing to catch up to the capitalist, modern West; and 2) it obscures the larger globality of which revolutionary China was a part, and to which it contributed.16 By focusing on nearly a century of translational exchanges between the two countries, and on Chinese as well as French texts, we see a dialectical exchange of revolutionary ideas, rather than a one-sided borrowing; this was a reciprocal yet largely asymmetrical exchange conditioned by the historical circumstances of global unevenness during the twentieth century. For example, as I argue in Chapter Three, while French Maoism has largely been studied as an Orientalist construction of French intellectuals, it was in fact to a large degree mediated by Mao and China’s substantial foreign translation and machine. And as I examine in Chapter Two, Chinese was no mere offshoot of

Western and French feminism, but emerged as a broad, transnational rethinking of social relations.

16 For an alternative approach that attends to China’s interactions with the non-Euro-American world during the height of Chinese , see Karl, Rebecca. Staging the World: at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

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Moreover, partly because interwar Paris was a cosmopolitan nexus for foreign exiles, anticolonial militants, and international labor and socialist movements, the focus on China and France, rather than concealing a larger globality, reveals a remarkable internationalist history. There was a certain exceptionalism to the France-China relationship – and not simply because the French tended to exceptionalize Sino-French relations, accentuating cultural affinities in order to situate France as the best-equipped to mediate between China and the West17 – but because there exists a history of important but largely forgotten radical – notably, anarchist – connections between the two countries that has been obscured by the dominance of in both China and

France.18 As I explore in Chapter One, France served as the site of a number of Chinese nation-building and diplomatic ventures in the early twentieth century. Not only were thousands of Chinese youth sent to study and labor in France as part of the well-known

Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement, France was also host to the first mass literacy program for Chinese laborers in modern Chinese history.19 This literacy program, in turn,

17 This French self-positioning was politically and economically motivated to enhance French interests in China against European competitors. For example, Paul Painlevé, mathematician, politician, and director of the Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, remarked tellingly in 1923: “France should not be lacking at a time when China, in the process of modernizing, is looking for intellectual guides and technical advisers. If we abandon the promotion of French culture in China today, German culture will benefit tomorrow at our expense. French civilization is the one best able to harmonise with ancient civilisations and allow them to develop unhindered. The of the world has nothing to gain from an Americanized or Anglicised China, guided solely in industrial and commercial methods.” Cited in Paul Bailey. "The Sino-French Connection: The Chinese Worker-Student Movement in France, 1902-1928." China and the West: Ideas and Activists. Ed. Goodman, David S.G. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990. 72-102, p. 96.

18 Marxist histories in general tend to marginalize the significance of to socialist and revolutionary .

19 The program was founded and organized by Yang Yangchu (James Yen), an American-trained teacher and educator, who developed a basic vocabulary primer of 1300 characters. See chapter one of Yurou Zhong’s dissertation, “Script Crisis and Literary Modernity in China, 1916-1958” (Ph.D. dissertation: Columbia University, 2014). 9

was affiliated with the Chinese Labor Corps (roughly 140,000 to 200,000 Chinese soldier-laborers) sent to France to aid British and French troops during the Great War.

Some of the soldier-laborers would remain in France after the War, a few as participants in the Diligent Work-Frugal Study program. Others would join the International Brigades to fight in the , heading to Spain across the French Pyrenees, or by boat from . I suspect that these early twentieth-century Sino-French connections may be due less to perceived cultural affinities than to a somewhat paradoxical combination of nationalist geopolitical agendas, and an emergent socialist internationalism. In fact, one of the most exciting moments in this study of the translation of revolution between China and France has been the revelation of the internationalist aspect of revolution at certain historical junctures – an internationalism that has been subsequently lost to the nationalization of communist and anticolonial movements. The

Sino-French connection uncovers an extraordinary history of Chinese students and workers, who participated in European wars of their own accord, at times without the backing of a home , who joined non-Chinese Communist parties, and who were active in labor movements that were organized along class rather than ethnic or racial lines.20

My focus on translation and its relation to the political is inspired by the work of a number of translation and comparative literature scholars, such as Lydia Liu, Mary

Louise Pratt, Emily Apter and Lawrence Venuti, as will be evident in subsequent chapters. However, the overarching framework of my problematic is most indebted to the

20 For more about the internationalism of overseas Chinese, see Gregor Benton. Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917-1945. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 10

work of Liu on translation and cross-cultural exchanges between China and the West. In particular, my notion of translation exceeds the traditional notions of an interlingual exchange between “target” and “source” languages, and encompasses a wider range of what Liu terms translingual practices such as rhetorical strategies, legitimizing processes, naming practices, discursive formations, tropes, and narrative modes:

Broadly defined, the study of translingual practice examines the process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arise, circulate, and acquire legitimacy within the host language due to, or in spite of, the latter’s contact/collision with the guest language. Meanings, therefore, are not so much “transformed” when concepts pass from the guest language to the host language as invented within the local environment of the latter. In that sense, translation is no longer a neutral untouched by the contending interests of political and ideological struggles. Instead, it becomes the very site of such struggles where the guest language is forced to encounter the host language, where the irreducible differences between them are fought out, invoked or challenged, dissolved or created, and so forth, until new words and meanings emerge in the host language itself.21

In place of “target” and “source” language, Liu proposes “host language (zhufang yuyan) and “guest language” (kefang yuyan) to avoid the problematic concepts of authenticity, origin, fidelity, influence, and so on, embedded in the idea of a source language, and the teleological goal implicit in the term “target” language. By focusing on “host” and

“guest,” Liu is able to emphasize the agency and complicity of the (non-European) host language in interlingual contact. Interestingly, in French, the single word “hôte” refers to both guest and host, suggesting an even more profound co-existence and complicity between host and guest languages – a felicitous way to describe the France-China

21 Emphasis mine. Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity, China, 1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 26.

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relationship, as each country at various moments strove to situate itself as the most appropriate hôte for mediating East-West relations.

Fundamental to Liu’s theory of translation is the argument that translation is a fundamentally political act with potentially far-reaching consequences. Texts and discourses do not merely reflect history, but are “social facts like any other facts, capable of being deployed for political or ideological purposes.”22 The changing of words, concepts, and discourses, and the invention of neologisms do not – as per

Raymond Williams’ keyword study – simply “bear witness to larger historical processes,” but are constitutive of those processes themselves. As Liu has demonstrated in her study of the Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International

Law,23 and P.C. Chang’s contribution to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,24 translation is much more than a matter of intercultural communication, of linguistic equivalence or (in)commensurability; it is very significantly a meaning-making event in its own right. As Liu has elaborated, the Chinese translation of the Elements of

International (Wangguo gongfa) can be said to constitute three distinct events: a textual event (the invention, suspension, or removal of words and their meanings in the course of translation), a diplomatic event (the selection of which texts were to be included or excluded reflected the diplomatic tensions among the imperial powers in

22 Ibid., p. 22.

23 Liu, Lydia. “Legislating the Universal: The Circulation of International Law in the Nineteenth Century” in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, p. 127-164.

24 Liu, Lydia. "Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948." Critical Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014): 385-417.

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China), and an epistemological event (the emergence of a new, global geopolitical consciousness).25

Translation, in other words, is a site of struggle where meaning, embedded in specific times and places, is negotiated between individuals with particular and often conflicting worldviews and agendas. Inherent in the process of translation are acts of mistranslation, omission, and substitution, whether conscious or unintentional. To understand the “eventfulness” of translation then, is to track how texts and discourses move across space and time – their multiple temporalities, spatiality, layers of mediation, agents, and means of transport. In Liu’s elaboration of an alternative translation paradigm that rethinks the relation of translation to the political, she proposes the notions of temporality, (i.e., the marking of difference in relation to a universal, normative standard), and competing universals (e.g., non-Western humanisms). This method, as Liu puts it, involves “analyzing the multiple temporalities of translation in differentially distributed discursive practices across languages.”26 By “differentially distributed discursive practices,” I believe Liu is pointing to the role that writing and discourse play in marking difference, as well as to the knowledge/power relationships produced in and through discursive formations. Playing with the multiple meanings of the verb différer in French (to disagree, to differ, and to defer), Derrida famously invented

25 Liu, Lydia. “Legislating the Universal: The Circulation of International Law in the Nineteenth Century” in Tokens of Exchange, p. 127-164. See also "The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference, and Competing Universals." translation: a transdisciplinary journal. (2014) 147-70.

26 Ibid., my emphasis, p. 167.

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the homophone différance to express the plural meanings lost by the noun différence.27 In the case of a translational encounter between China and the West, this triple signification captures aptly the marking of difference, the staging of a disagreement, and the over- determined sense of delay when traveling between “East” and “West.” By the latter, I mean the dominant discourse – as exemplified by Marx’s great modes-of-production narrative – that situates the West on one end of a temporal spectrum (the apex of progress and the end of history), and the rest of the world in various stages of delay and behindness. This global diachronic narrative, as Tang Xiaobing has remarked, is “the lasting dilemma of modernity,”28 too often assumed by Western and non-Western scholars (not to mention non-scholars) alike.

Moreover, I take Liu’s concept of differentially distributed discursive practices to refer to the asymmetry of translation between the West and non-Euro-American countries. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, translations were carried out disproportionately in favor of Western languages; that is, a tremendous number of

Western texts, discourses, and concepts traveled to Asia while relatively few traveled in the reverse direction. As Talal Asad remarked in his incisive critique of British cultural anthropology:

To put it crudely, because the languages of Third World … are “weaker” in relation to Western languages (and today, especially to English), they are more likely to submit to forcible transformation in the translation process than the other way around. The reason for this is, first, that in their political-economic relations

27 Cf. Derrida, Jacques. Alan Bass, trans. Writing and Difference. : University of Chicago Press, 1978. Originally published as L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1967. Reprint 1979.

28 Cited in Rebecca Karl’s Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, p. 9.

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with Third World countries, Western nations have the greater ability to manipulate the latter. And second, Western languages produce and deploy desired knowledge more readily than Third World languages do.29

Drawing upon Foucault’s critique of institutional practices and the knowledge/power relationships that legitimize certain ways of thinking while discouraging others, a wide range of scholars have argued that powerful social ideologies and discourses are produced in and through (translated) texts.30 The asymmetry between languages Asad highlights not only reflects conditions of geopolitical and economic inequality, but also plays a fundamental role in contributing to that very inequality. At stake in this analysis of discursive practices across languages, space, and time, as Liu and Asad have cogently argued in different contexts, is the historicity of translation between cultures.31

Liu’s focus on the discursive mobility of texts, concepts, and people across languages, places, and temporalities seems to me especially pertinent for the study of the exchange of revolutionary ideas between China and France because it attends to the historical and political contingencies, as well as to the material conditions of translation.

In doing so, it avoids what Keith Baker in Inventing the French Revolution calls “an

29 Asad, Talal. "The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology." Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. 141-64.

30 For different approaches, see Mary Louise Pratt. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London, New York: Routledge, 1992; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity, China, 1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Rafael Vicente. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

31 As a number of postcolonial scholars have explained, historicity as opposed to History, emphasizes what Nietzsche might term “effective history,” or “the part of history that is still operative and meaningful in the present,” and that refuses to see an end or goal toward which history moves. In Liu, Translingual Practice, p. 22.

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endless genealogical regression into the history of political doctrines.” 32 Since revolutionary concepts such as liberty and equality, and the idea of a

“have existed more or less confusedly in all human society,” reconstructing a history of revolutionary ideas that emphasizes influence or origins would likely lead us in circles.

Furthermore, as a theory of how concepts and discourses are (re)invented through translation, the eventfulness of translation and its focus on temporality dovetails with my emphasis on revolution. Revolution, as a metaphor and vehicle of radical change, by definition restructures how we think of time. As Baker argues elsewhere, throughout most of the eighteenth century, revolution was seen as something that had already happened, often out of human control. By the nineteenth century, revolution no longer signified a fait accompli, but an ongoing act, “a process of transformation within modern society.” 33 In Baker’s words, “from 1789… the moment of revolution was opened up and extended from within to become a domain of lived experience with its own dynamic and its own chronology.” It was “[no] longer viewed solely from without or through the lens of historical hindsight” but had “emerged as an immediate present in a frame of action opening up to the future.”34 That is to say, revolution became the site of convergence of multiple temporalities (past, present, future), and as “the name for a collective political

32 Baker, Keith Michael. Inventing the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 23.

33 Baker, Keith Michael, “Revolutionizing Revolution” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, eds. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015, p. 86.

34 Ibid., p. 84.

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act ushering in the birth of a new world,”35 it also pointed to a competing vision of the world – a rival modernity – that has yet to come into existence. The rather abstract sense of temporality Baker refers to was concretized in the invention of a new clock (that divided the day into 100,000 seconds) and calendar (the briefly used French

Revolutionary Calendar of 1793-1805), and commemorated in the name of the 1911

Xinhai Revolution (Xinhai geming 辛亥革命) that overthrew the . The revolution was so named because it occurred in 1911, the year of the Xinhai stem-branch according to the sexagenary cycle of the Chinese calendar. With the establishment of the

Republic of China in 1912, the traditional Chinese calendar was abolished, and the

Gregorian calendar implemented in its place, marking the institutionalization of a new temporality that brought China, literally, in tempo with the .36

To comprehend twentieth-century Sino-French sites of translation and their implications for the Chinese Revolution, we must first turn to China’s fraught historical situation during the late Qing (1860s-1911), and Chinese intellectuals’ engagement with diverse “worlds of thinking” that made possible the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the birth of the Chinese Republic. I borrow the term “worlds of thinking” from Lydia Liu,

Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko’s introduction to The Birth of Chinese Feminism to signify the various texts and contexts, languages and concepts, both foreign and native, that

Chinese radicals engaged with and operated in, and through which they understood their

35 Ibid.

36 Public acceptance was slow, however, and due to President ’s switch to a dual-calendar policy later adopted by the Communist Party, the Chinese calendar remained in limited use. Today, China follows the Gregorian calendar for most purposes but traditional holidays, such as the Lunar New Year, are still celebrated according to the Chinese calendar.

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historical moment.37

On Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Translation of “Worlds of Thinking”

Frantz Fanon once asserted, “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”38 What happens when the very foundations of that world, including its language and culture are called into question? When calls for revolution beckon to make the world anew? And more to the point, given that no spoken languages are pure, uncontaminated by other cultures and linguistic communities, what happens when multiple worlds collide within language? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, China was facing such a crisis in the wake of a forced opening up to the world via several consecutive military defeats against foreign powers, as well as the import into China of paradigm- changing ideologies and sociocultural values through missionary work and translated texts.

On the eve of the 1911 Revolution, the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), China’s last imperial regime, was on the brink of collapse.39 After centuries of regional domination and the economic upper hand in dealings with foreign nations, the historically self- sufficient Chinese empire and its traditional values and sources of began to

37 The editors evoke “worlds of thinking” as a more supple alternative to paradigms of (“Eastern” or “Western”) “influence,” which imply “a more mechanical process of interaction and [distort] the interpretative processes of intellectual work.” The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 28.

38 , Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967, 38.

39 Founded by a Jurchen tribe based in , the Qing Dynasty succeeded the Han-ruled Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Early Manchu rulers united multiple ethnicities and military-social units (including Manchu, Han, and Mongol) and consolidated the territory that would become the modern Chinese nation- state.

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unravel. Although the Qing was initially a robust empire, by the 1800s, growing demand for Chinese tea, silk and porcelain in Europe combined with the global silver crisis led to a trade imbalance that deeply troubled European powers. Britain tried to offset the imbalance by substituting opium (a product easily grown in its new Indian colony) for silver payments. As opium spread rapidly and destructively through China, the Dao

Guang Emperor attempted to enforce a ban on the addictive substance, leading to the infamous Opium Wars (1839-1842; 1856-1860), which forced the Qing government to agree to free trade and territorial concessions. Other foreign powers, including France,

Germany, Russia and the , competing against each other for wealth and territory, soon joined Britain in a land grab for spheres of influence in East Asia. By the turn of the twentieth century, after decades of internal and external conflicts from the

Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) to the Opium Wars, the Sino-French War (1884-1885), the (1900-1901), and all the more humbling, China’s defeat in the first

Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) to Japan – a tributary country historically seen as inferior – the very foundations of China’s age-old civilization were crumbling.

In this radically new global context, educated elites sought to rethink Chinese civilization from its core – literature, philosophy, cultural customs, military institutions, political systems, educational establishments, even the itself – were reevaluated and reimagined in an ambitious “self-strengthening” (ziqiang) campaign that later became known as modernization (jindai/xiandai hua).40 Progressive elites led by

40 The self-strengthening movement launched in the 1860s laid the infrastructure for gentry political involvement and Western learning. It lost some momentum in the late nineteenth century as the Qing proved incapable of protecting the country against foreign aggression, and gave way to more radical movements, including the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, and revolutionary uprisings. One of the primary schools of thought in the self-strengthening movement was called the “Study of Wealth and Power” 19

Kang Youwei and his disciple embarked on a monumental restructuring program, the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, which called for, among other things, establishing a constitutional monarchy, eliminating the civil service exams, and industrializing the country in line with capitalist principles. Although the reform-minded

Emperor Guangxu was receptive, his mother, the and her conservative supporters staged a coup d’état, crushing the movement in its tracks. The failure of the Hundred Days Reform followed by the violently crushed anti-foreign Boxer

Rebellion, which further stoked patriotic outrage and forced the Empress to enact several of the suppressed reforms, paved the way for a more revolutionary radicalism. The

Wuchang Uprising in October 1911 against Qing proposals to nationalize the railways in order to pay off Boxer indemnities proved to be the last straw. In a matter of months,

China’s millennia-old monarchic system was swept away, and a provisional republic proclaimed on January 1, 1912.41

Leading up to the revolution and the establishment of a Chinese republic, numerous editorials in a newly burgeoning newspaper and print industry debated how best to save

China from territorial dissolution and racial extinction. The emergence of a global

(Fuqiang xue), which was largely inspired by the sociologist ’s application of Darwin’s survival of the fittest to human societies. As Liu, Karl, and Ko write, the study of wealth and power stressed “the technological militarization and institutional-bureaucratic rationalization, as well as the socioeconomic industrialization of coastal China … and manufacturing strength. The source of labor to fuel these semipublic or semiprivate endeavors would be the vast population of China’s rural interior” already squeezed by landlord surplus extraction and imperial taxation. See Liu, Lydia H., Rebecca E. Karl, Dorothy Ko, eds. The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p. 30-31. See also Schwartz, Benjamin. In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.

41 The actual date of the establishment of the Republic of China remains contested. While the provisional government was declared and Sun Zhongshan appointed provisional President on Jan. 1, 1912, the Qing court did not officially abdicate until February, and Yuan Shikai was not inaugurated as the Republic’s first President until March.

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political consciousness among Chinese intellectuals was shaped by and motivated an unprecedented surge in translations of foreign, especially Western texts. Most of these translations appeared in a politically radical overseas press that helped set the stage for revolutionary uprisings.42 I explore the nature of these translations in Chapter One. For now, I would like to emphasize the emergence of a new transnational public sphere in the early 1900s that emerged in the wake of China’s forced entry into the world, and intensified after the fall of the Qing. The new public sphere was not only the product of translated texts, but of transculturated individuals – exiled intellectuals and overseas students, who engaged with foreign peoples, ideas, and languages as part of their daily lived experience. Translation and transculturation played a crucial role in the articulation of Chinese modernity, and I would add, in the articulation of Chinese revolutionary discourse.43 Not only did histories of other civilizations (both Western powers, and “lost” or colonized countries such as India and Poland), and translations of foreign texts produced by missionaries, Qing officials, and scholars explode at this time, but the interest in Western learning led to the establishment of an Interpreter’s College

(Tongwenguan) affiliated with the Zongli Yamen (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), a scientific translation bureau based at the Jiangnan Arsenal, as well as numerous study

42 See MacKinnon, Stephen. "A History of the Chinese Press in the Republican Period." Modern China Vol. 23.No. 1 (Jan. 1997): 3 - 32.

43 See Liu, Lydia. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity, China, 1900-1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, and Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999; Shaobo Xie, “Translating Modernity Towards Translating China” in Luo, Xianmin and He Yuanjian, eds. Translating China. Topics in Translation. Bristol, UK: MPG Books Group, Ltd., 2009.

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societies.44 Once frowned upon, overseas study began to be encouraged among educated elites; state schools incorporated scientific study alongside Confucian , and numerous private academies, and professional training institutions designed along

Western lines were opened.45 At stake in the unprecedented translation and dissemination of foreign ideologies and practices during the last few decades of the Qing dynasty is not the influence of the West on China or vice versa, but the complex processes of negotiation between conflicting values and paradigms, as Chinese intellectuals simultaneously questioned and assimilated foreign ideological models under highly unequal geopolitical conditions.

In the chapters that ensue, I show how changes in meaning of revolutionary ideologies, and of the notion of revolution itself in both China and France occurred via translation and translingual practices. These historically contingent displacements of meaning, in turn, did not merely reflect or bear witness to existing material conditions and historical processes, but served as the very grounds of change; they were simultaneously shaped and helped to shape the Republican Revolution of 1911, the New

Culture (1915) and May Fourth (1919) movements, the Great Proletarian Cultural

Revolution (1966), and May 1968. The first chapter examines how Chinese intellectuals such as , Liang Qichao, and processed the French

Revolution as they articulated their own politics in the context of dynastic overthrow, semi-colonialism, civil war, and peasant revolution. I argue that anarchism was a key

44 Zarrow, Peter. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924 Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, p. 20-22.

45 Hayhoe, Ruth. "A Comparative Approach to the Cultural Dynamics of Sino-Western Educational Cooperation." The China Quarterly No. 104 (Dec. 1985): 676-99.

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mode of translation in the invention of a unique revolutionary discourse that attempted to negotiate between a race-based nationalism, and a socialist internationalism. In the second chapter, I show how the debates surrounding socialist revolution were linked to (a global) feminism. As Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko demonstrate in The Birth of Chinese Feminism (2013), the Chinese women’s movement was not a derivative of socialism and a complement to nationalism, but in fact introduced to

Chinese radical intellectuals. The Communist Manifesto was published for the first time in Tianyi Bao (Natural ), an important anarchist journal edited by He-Yin Zhen, a female theorist who played a leading role in the birth of Chinese feminism. I bring He-

Yin Zhen into conversation with and , whose works on

Chinese women (published in 1957 and 1974 respectively) have been roundly criticized for their blatant Orientalism.

The third chapter shifts to the relationship between Maoism, May ’68, and the

Chinese Cultural Revolution in the French/Francophone context. It examines the interwovenness of the French and Chinese revolutionary traditions made explicit by the mutual fascination of Parisian soixante-huitards for the , and of Mao and the Red Guards for the Paris Communards. Drawing upon Maoist journals, films, and material book history, I investigate the processes of translation and mistranslation, naming and omission that were involved in the search for, and articulation of new cultural and political models. The final chapter examines how the Francophone Cultural

Revolution novels of Chinese-origin novelists draw upon and reinforce the reversal in attitude – the repudiation of revolution – that many prominent French intellectuals espoused with the post-May restoration of state power. Novels such as

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François Cheng’s Le Dit de Tianyi, Dai Sijie’s Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, and

Wei Wei’s Une fille zhuang recount coming-of-age tales in which young men and women are sent to labor camps in the countryside, but whose true reeducation occurs through the illicit reading of . French, as the language of self-liberation, is associated with Enlightenment ideals and human rights, as well as with a certain idea of France as a world literary capital. I argue that revolution is displaced from these texts in favor of a discourse of concomitant with the global shift from “revolution to ethics” that occurred in the late seventies and eighties, and that has since manifested itself as a post-socialist ideology undergirding transnational capitalism.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Sword of Revolution:

Translating Change in Late Qing and Early Republican China

In a quiet wooded glade in the Bois de Boulogne, a former hunting ground for

Louis XVI located on the western edge of Paris, eighteen Chinese youth gathered from various corners of Europe to found the European branch of the Chinese Communist

Youth League (Lü-ou Zhongguo Shaonian Gongchangdang).46 It was the summer of

1922 – approximately ten years after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of Republic of China, five years after the , over three years after the Great War and the May Fourth Movement, and one year after the founding of the (CCP) in Shanghai. France, as much of the rest of the industrialized world, was in a deep recession. The young Chinese republic was divided among inland territories ruled by militarist and coastal cities run by imperialist powers. Worldwide, numerous mass movements with competing ideologies were gathering force in response to the global economic slump and concomitant political unrest. Interwar Paris, nevertheless, was a dynamic, cosmopolitan nexus where writers, artists, students, migrant laborers, anticolonial activists, and exiled intellectuals

46 The establishment of the ECYL was followed by the founding of the European branch of the Chinese Communist Party in the winter of 1922. The two organizations had shared objectives and overlapping membership. For a detailed history of the genesis of the European Communist organizations, see Chapters 7 and 8 of John Kong-cheong Leong’s unpublished dissertation, “The Chinese Work-Study Movement: The Social and Political Experience of Chinese Students and Student-Workers in France, 1913-1925” (Brown University, 1982). See also Levine, Marilyn. "The Diligent-Work Frugal-Study Movement and the ." Republican China Vol. 12.1 (1986): 67-88.

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congregated, engaging in myriad political, artistic, and cultural debates and movements.

The crucible of various prominent aesthetic and cultural modernisms, and political and anti-colonial movements, France served as the site of an overlooked but crucial encounter between Chinese and French intellectuals and laborers that forged a particular revolutionary consciousness in the early twentieth century.

Over the course of three days in the Bois de Boulogne, the eighteen founding members of the European Chinese Communist Youth League, representing a total of forty Chinese students and workers from France, Germany and Belgium, debated organizational goals and structures, drafted rules of conduct, and elected three principal officers.47 Among the league’s members were several important future Communist Party leaders, including Zhou Enlai, , Li Lisan and Deng Xiaoping, to name just a few.48 These young Chinese and their compatriots were studying in Europe, mainly in

France, as part of a Sino-French work-study program first launched in 1912, the same year as the birth of the Chinese Republic. Organized by anarchists, the program’s principal aims were threefold: to help Chinese youth acquire Western scientific and cultural knowledge, to cultivate moral virtue through labor, and – anticipating the sending of students to rural villages and factories during the Cultural Revolution and the établi movement during May ’68 – to abolish the division between intellectual and manual

47 Zhao Shiyan (1901-1927), a brilliant Sichuanese youth leader active in the May Fourth Movement, was named General Secretary; Zhou Enlai (1898-1976), who had by then made a name for himself as an influential political writer in the Chinese community in Europe was designated propaganda head; and Li Weihan (1897-1983), a Hunanese activist, was elected to be the liaison with the Chinese Communist Party.

48 Other prominent student-laborers included Chen Yannian and Chen Qiaonian, the sons of CCP co- founder . Mao was not one of the participants but nevertheless saw off a number of friends from his native province in Shanghai, including Cai Hesen, an early Marxist leader in France who was killed in Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek’s) violent 1927 purge of the Communist party.

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labor. Renting chairs from an old woman who operated a tea concession in the park, the young Chinese radicals attired in stylish Western suits could have easily passed for leisurely city-dwellers enjoying a summer picnic in a scene out of a nineteenth-century

French novel or painting, rather than patriotic radicals plotting revolution.49

The pronounced discrepancy between act and setting, reality and perception, reflects the eclecticism and internal contradictions of a movement that was not quite what it seemed on the surface, and whose historical significance has long been over-shadowed by the celebrity of some of its participants.50 Due to the political prominence of many of the student-workers in CCP history in later years, the Diligent-Work-Frugal-Study movement (Qingong jianxue yundong 勤工儉學運動) (1919-1921) has been studied primarily as an important precursor to China’s in French,

American, and . The majority of French and American studies focus on the radicalization of an intellectual elite who purportedly turned to under the influence of post-war labor and communist movements in Europe, treating the

European Chinese Communist Organizations as influential conduits for the development of (a European-directed) communism in China,51 while Chinese studies tend to

49 As one attendee commented, Zhou Enlai, who was wearing an elegant yellow jacket “was neatly dressed, not like someone working in a factory.” Cited in Gao Wenqian, Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary: A , Peter Rand and Lawrence R. Sullivan, transl. New York: Public Affairs, 2007, p. 42.

50 Dozens of the approximately 1600 participants in the Diligent-Work-Frugal-Study movement would go on to become prominent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres. Living in Europe, the work-study radicals were able to escape the frequent arrests and bloody purges of their comrades in China and Japan, had easier access to radical materials, enjoyed relative independence from Comintern direction, and in general had greater of movement, although they were watched closely by the French police.

51 See for example Brandt, Conrad. "The French-returned elite in the Chinese Communist Party" in E.F. Szczepanik (ed.), Symposium on Economic and Social Problems of the Far East (, 1962): 229- 39; Kriegel, Annie. Communismes au miroir français. Paris: Gallimard, 1974; Wang, Nora. “Paris- 27

mythologize the moral rectitude and illustrious career trajectories of early party leaders.

Starting in the post-Mao 1980s, after a period of silence on the during the Cultural

Revolution, interest in the work-study program surged and numerous studies were published in China, ostensibly because Deng Xiaoping was a participant, but more likely, as Paul Bailey has noted, to underscore Zhou Enlai’s role in the Communist movement.52

In general, much of the scholarship on the Sino-French Work-Study movement over the last three decades emphasizes a linear progression in Chinese political discourse from national salvation by way of (jiaoyu jiuguo 教育救國) to salvation via

(communist or ultra-nationalist) revolution (geming jiuguo 革命救國), overlooking the myriad correspondences and conflicts between educational and revolutionary activities.

More recent studies argue for the diffuse nature of political discourse and activities

Shanghai : débats d'idées et pratiques sociales, les intellectuels progressistes chinois 1920-1925," 3 vols. (Thèses d’état, Université de Paris, 1986); and Wang, Nora. “Deng Xiaoping, the years in France.” The China Quarterly. (Dec. 1982): 695-705.

52 Bailey, Paul. "The Chinese Work-Study Movement in France." The China Quarterly. No. 115 (Sep. 1988): 441-61. Bailey notes that all three volumes of Fu Fa qingong jianxue yundong shiliao (Historical Materials on the Work-Study Movement in France) compiled by the Qinhua University Faculty Research Unit on the History of the Communist Party, (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1979-81) begin with articles by Zhou Enlai, and were published at the same time as Zhou’s letters from Europe written between 1920 and 1924, Lü-ou tongxin (Letters from Europe). (Beijing, 1979). Zhou Enlai also plays a predominant role in the editors’ introduction to Zhang Yunhou, Yan Xuyi, and Li Junchen’s document collection, Liu Fa qingong jianxue yundong (The Work-Study Movement in France), 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1980, 1986). See also Wang Yongxiang, Kong Fanfeng, and Liu Pinqing, Zhongguo gongchandang lüou zhibu shihua (The History of the European Chinese Communist Organizations), (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1985); Zhang Hongxiang and Wang Yongxiang, Liu Fa qingong jianxue yundong jianshi (Concise History of the Diligent-Work-Frugal-Study Movement to France), (: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1982); Huang Liqun, Liu Fa qingong jianxue jianshi (Concise History of the Diligent-Work-Frugal-Study in France) (Beijing, Jiaoyu kexue chubanshe, 1982); Guo Sheng, Wusi shiqi de gongdu yundong he gongdu sichao (The Work-Study Movement and Work-Study Thought Tide of the May Fourth Period), (Beijing: Jiaoyu kexue chubanshe, 1986); and Chen Sanjing’s documentary collection, Qingong jianxue yundong (The Work-Study Movement). Taibei: Zhengzhong shuju,1981 as well as his monograph, Qingong jianxue de fazhan (The Development of the Work-Study Movement), Taibei: Dongda tushu gongsi, 1988.

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within the movement,53 examine the evolving educational thought of the period,54 or analyze the communists’ radical break with tradition in terms of a worldwide generational conflict.55 These histories assert that, despite its deep identification with early Chinese Communist Party leadership, membership in the European Chinese

Communist organizations was extremely diverse and overlapped with many other

Chinese political organizations founded in Europe at the same time.56 Zhou Enlai, for instance, was instrumental in the founding of the European Chinese Communist organizations, as well as of the European branch of the Guomindang (GMD, Nationalist

Party).57 In the early 1920s, Chinese radicals dissatisfied with the results of the 1911

Revolution were divided as to what the continuing Chinese revolution should entail, as well as how to achieve it. There were numerous socialisms being discussed, theorized and practiced by Chinese revolutionaries, both at home and abroad; of these, anarcho-

53 See Gloria Tseng’s dissertation, “Chinese Pieces of the French Mosaic: The Chinese Experience in France and the Making of a Revolutionary Tradition.” UC Berkeley, 2002. See also Levine, Marilyn. "The Diligent-Work Frugal-Study Movement and the New Culture Movement." Republican China Vol. 12.1 (1986): 67-88; and John Kong-cheong Leong’s 1982 dissertation completed at Brown University, “The Chinese Work-Study Movement.”

54 Bailey, Paul. "The Chinese Work-Study Movement in France." The China Quarterly. No. 115 (Sep. 1988): 441-61. See also Bailey’s unpublished dissertation, “ in China, 1904-1919: New Ideas and Developments.” University of British Columbia, 1982.

55 Levine, Marilyn. The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe During the Twenties. & London: Press, 1993.

56 In addition to the ECCO, there were numerous Chinese political organizations established in France between 1922 and 1923, including the anarchist Surplus Society, the Chinese Social Democratic Party, the conservative Chinese Youth Party, and the European Branch of the Guomindang. See Marilyn Levine and Chen San-ching. The Chinese Guomindang in Europe: A Sourcebook of Documents. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

57 In the 1920s, Sun Zhongshan’s Guomindang (GMD) Party had far greater numbers than the newly founded Chinese Communist Party. The first was formed between the CCP and the GMD in 1923 to unify China against warlords and imperialists at the urging of the Comintern.

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communism was the most significant, and Marxism, still fairly marginal.58 The anarchist founders of the Work-Study Movement, Li Shizeng and , for example, had joined Sun Zhongsan’s nationalist Alliance League ( 同盟會) in 1905, and were later instrumental in the GMD’s suppression of Communists, while Sun

Zhongshan’s nationalist agenda included elements of a socialist program.

Although recent scholarship has revealed the Work-Study program’s political and ideological heterogeneity, most studies still largely attribute the politicization of students to either the May Fourth Movement, or to European socialist influence. While it is true that many of the Chinese student-workers were politicized during the May Fourth protests in China, and radicalized (or in some cases deradicalized) in France, other participants gained a new political consciousness through their experience laboring in

French factories alongside French workers and living in impoverished conditions. Several program participants had also been worker-soldiers during the Great War, and were politicized by their war experience as well as through interactions with Chinese intellectuals and radicals, and through the various organizational and educational activities of the program. Still others, through the introduction of Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho

Chih Minh) attended the Congrès du Tours and joined the . The politicization of the student-workers was thus not the result of the May Fourth

Movement, or the French labor experience alone; it was a truly transnational convergence of diverse persons amidst several, overlapping moments of political awakening in the context of global warfare, mass education movements, and an emergent socialist

58 On this topic, see Arif Dirlik’s seminal study, The Origins of Chinese Communism. Oxford: , 1989.

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internationalism, mediated at the time largely through the lens of anarchism.

As Arif Dirlik has argued, most radical thought of the time, including Marxism, was filtered through an anarchist lens.59 That is not to say that all ideas of the time, or all of the student-laborers were or considered themselves anarchist. Nevertheless, anarchism underpinned the “curious mixture of ideas of , democratic and ,”60 and the general mood of “euphoric revolutionary eclecticism”61 present during the New Culture (1915)62, and May Fourth Movements (1919) out of which the Work-Study program grew, and to which it contributed. Remarkably, despite the prevalence of anarchist ideology among Chinese intellectuals in the early 1920s, and its formative role in the Work-Study program, anarchism is little mentioned if at all in current scholarship on the movement. There is, in effect, a curious tension between the anti-government philosophy of anarchism that sees all authority as corrupt, and the rising nationalism driving the politicization of Chinese student-laborers, as well as French

59 See Dirlik, Arif. "The New Culture Movement Revisited: Anarchism and the Idea of in New Culture Thinking." Modern China Vol. 11. No. 3 (July 1985): 251-300; and Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

60 Mao’s remarks to Edgar Snow in a 1936 interview with the journalist. See Red Star Over China, NewYork: Grove Press, 1938, reprint 1968, p. 147. Chow Tse-tsung, in his seminal study of the May Fourth movment remarked that this diffuseness “represented the main current of thought of the active and restless youth in the middle of the May Fourth Movement.” The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1960, p. 75.

61 Dirlik, Arif. "The New Culture Movement Revisited: Anarchism and the Idea of Social Revolution in New Culture Thinking." Modern China Vol. 11. No. 3 (July 1985): 251-300.

62 The New Culture Movement of the mid 1910s to 20s arose in response to the newly founded Chinese Republic’s inability to address China’s problems, including, most notably, continued Japanese aggression. An iconoclastic literary and intellectual movement, the New Culture Movement contained many eclectic schools of thought, among which anarchism was a vital undercurrent. New Culture intellectuals tended to question Chinese tradition and promote Western learning, especially science and democracy. Many of its leading intellectuals (such as , , and CCP co-founders Chen Duxiu and ) were classically educated scholars who challenged the Confucian tradition they were trained in, and upon which was built.

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relations with China during this period that has yet to be addressed. What are we to make of, on the one hand, an emergent socialist solidarity emphasizing globalism, and the liberty and equality of all peoples, and on the other, a nascent nationalism that aims to enhance the wealth and power – and ultimately, the inequality – of individual nation- states? It seems to me that this was a period when two radically different projects – one a utopian socialist, and the other, a nation-building project – co-existed, sharing proponents, goals, and activities to a certain degree, and diverging and conflicting in other ways.

In contrast to accounts that leave out anarchism, or treat the transition from education to revolution in Chinese political discourse as a linear progression, I argue that anarchism is the missing link to understanding how revolutionary concepts were mediated at this time. I further advance that anarchism was a mode of translation that enabled the articulation of a rival vision of modernity, a “competing universal.” As a mode of translation it legitimized certain discourses by linking, for instance, European anarchism’s concept of “a based upon the principles of justice, equality, and brotherly love”63 to the Confucian notion of datong 大同 (great unity), and very importantly, it “provided a vocabulary, a language, with which a new generation could articulate concepts that were emerging into its consciousness.”64 Moreover, anarchism did not only mediate discursive formations, it also set into motion several transnational projects, such as worker education programs, cross-cultural exchanges, literacy programs,

63 Fleming, Marie. The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth Century European Anarchism. London: Croom and Helm, 1979, p. 126.

64 Dirlik, Arif. "The New Culture Movement Revisited: Anarchism and the Idea of Social Revolution in New Culture Thinking." Modern China Vol. 11. No. 3 (July 1985), p. 292. 32

communal villages, and schools; in doing so, it created the spaces for exchange between diverse individuals and groups. That is, anarchism was a lived experience. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, in addition to the Work-Study movement, anarchists were involved in two related but largely forgotten Sino-French encounters: the

Chinese Labor Corps sent to France to aid British and French troops during the Great

War (1916-1919), and the Chinese soldiers of the International Brigades in the Spanish

Civil War (1936-1939). Even though the principal agents for the recruitment of Chinese workers and students for both wars and the Work-Study program, as well as some of the participating students, and worker-soldiers were the same, only very recently have these connections come to light, with a small number of scholars publishing on the Chinese involvement in twentieth-century European wars.65 Additionally, the first mass literacy program in modern Chinese history was launched in Bourgogne during the Great War.

Chinese soldier-laborers first began to learn to read and write Chinese on French soil through the organizational efforts of Yan Yangchu (James Yen, 1893-1990).66 Although I do not wish to exaggerate the links between the Sino-French Work-Study programs and

China’s participation in overseas wars, I believe studying the processes of travel,

65 See Xu, Guoqi. China and the Great War: China's Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Benton, Gregor. Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917-1945. London and New York: Routledge, 2007; Bailey, Paul. "Chinese Labour in France and the Fluctuations of Historical Memory." Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 14 (2014): 362-82. For the only existing study (to my knowledge) of Chinese participation in the Spanish Civil War, see Ni Huirui and Zou Ningyuan. Dang shi jie nian qing de shihou: Can jia Xibanya nei zhan de Zhongguo ren, 1936-1939 (The Call of Spain: the Chinese Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939). Guilin: shi fan da xue ban she, 2013. First published in traditional Chinese in Taiwan, the simplified Chinese version and Spanish translation, Los brigadistas chinos en la Guerra Civil: La llamada de España (1936-1939) both came out in 2013.

66 See “Combatting Illiteracy: The First Chinese Mass Literacy Program in the Great War,” chapter one of Yurou Zhong’s dissertation, “Script Crisis and Literary Modernity in China, 1916-1958” (Columbia University, 2014). 33

translation, and transculturation that occurred in this period will help concretize the abstract relationships between war, revolution, education, and labor.

One of the main objectives of this chapter is to highlight the importance of Sino-

French connections between the first and wars as crucial moments in the circulation of not only revolutionary ideas, but of diverse individuals – intellectuals, students, and laborers – who debated, transformed, and put into practice these ideas, and who were themselves changed, translated, by their French experience. It is for this reason that the Work-Study program, as a crucial site of translation, operates as the point of departure for this chapter. Looking both backward and forward from 1919, I aim to the development of an emergent revolutionary discourse, and the reciprocal effects between this discourse and the historical contexts in which it developed, and which it helped to transform. By examining how a diverse spectrum of ideas about rights and revolution were translated and put into practice by late Qing and early Republican intellectuals, overseas students, and migrant laborers, I hope to elucidate the historicity of revolutionary discourse as it was translated between China and France in the first half of the twentieth century. As I argue below, abstract values and notions of rights translated from the West through the lens of anarchism both diverged from and merged with

Chinese intellectual traditions, resulting in a unique Chinese revolutionary discourse that, enabled and limited by existing material conditions, oscillated between a radical internationalist solidarity, and a more narrow nationalism.

As we embark on the examination of a nascent Chinese revolutionary discourse, we might first ask, why, of the many social and political paradigms available for emulation, were certain Chinese intellectuals so fascinated with France? What role did Sino-French

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connections play in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, the elaboration of the New Culture and May Fourth movements, the turn from reform to revolution, and from anarchism to communism? Reciprocally, how did the various revolutions and radical movements impact the development of revolutionary discourses? Part of the answer to these questions lies in the conflicting interpretations of the French Revolution circulating in

China prior to 1911.

The French Revolution in late Qing Translation: Interlingual Slippage

and the Resignification of Geming 革命

Leading up to the 1911 Revolution, the national salvation debate was framed largely as a choice between reform and revolution. Both reform and anti-

Manchu revolutionaries sought to learn from foreign revolutionary models. Introduced to

Chinese intellectuals principally through translated Japanese histories, the French

Revolution, far from being a beacon of inspiration at the time, was perceived primarily as an example of what China should avoid. Yet, due to the superficial connections between the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the French Revolution of 1789, Chinese and Western historians have long described the French Revolution as an important model for the

Chinese Revolution.67 Focusing on their similarities – both revolutions overthrew a

67 See Yu Danchu, “The Introduction and Influence of the Great French Revolution in China During the Early Years of the 20th Century” and Zhang Zhilian. "A Century of Chinese Historiography of the French Revolution, 1889-1989" in China and the French Revolution: Proceedings of the International Conference, Shanghai, 18-21 March 1989. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1990. For a reevaluation of the connections between the two revolutions, see Bastid, Marianne. "L'Ouverture aux idées d'Occident: Quelle influence de la Révolution française sur la Révolution républicaine de 1911?" Extrême-Orient Extrême Occident No. 2. L'idée révolutionnaire et la Chine: La Question du modèle (1983): 21-39.

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monarchy and installed a secular republic in its place; both have been considered

“bourgeois revolutions” (despite evidence that a nascent Chinese was too weak to have played a leading role in the Revolution)68; both were sparked by foreign wars and invasions – such studies generally follow Marxist orthodoxy in proclaiming the

French Revolution “the mother of all revolutions,” and the direct model for subsequent socialist revolutions. However, Chinese reception towards the French Revolution at this early stage was ambivalent at best. In actuality, the American and British Revolutions, and especially, the Japanese Meiji Restoration were looked upon more favorably than the

French Revolution by reformers and revolutionaries alike. Curiously, Sun Zhongshan

(Sun Yat-sen, 1866-1925), father of the anti-Manchu revolution and the Chinese

Republic, made little mention of the French Revolution, even in his direct appeals to

French authorities for aid and protection.69 Nevertheless, I contend that Chinese intellectuals’ understanding of the French Revolution was integral to twentieth-century

Chinese Revolutions in two principal ways: in this early period, Chinese interpretations of Japanese histories of the French Revolution reshaped how Chinese intellectuals conceived of rights and revolution, paving the way for a republican revolution; and in subsequent periods, anarchist ideology cut from the mold of the French revolutionary

68 See Bergère, Marie-Claire. “The role of the bourgeoisie” in M.C. Wright, ed. China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900-1913. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

69 Bastid, Marianne. "L'Ouverture aux idées d'Occident," 22-23. Bastid notes that although Sun was careful to express his high opinion of the American Declaration of Independence, the parliamentary system in England, and the common East Asian heritage of China and Japan in his appeals to, respectively, American, British, and Japanese aid for the Chinese revolution, he was curiously reticent when it came to the French Revolution. Rather than focusing on the legacy of the French Revolution, Sun, as Jeffrey Barrow claims, appealed to the expansionist interests of France when he asked for assistance in the creation of an independent state in . If Sun had succeeded, Barrow argues, the separatist regime would have effectively been a French . See Barrow, Jeffrey G. Sun Yat-Sen and the French, 1900-1908. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979.

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tradition would inform the elaboration of Chinese social, cultural, and Communist revolution.

The ambivalence of late Qing intellectuals toward the French Revolution is perhaps best encapsulated by the fate of the word revolution, geming 革命, itself. In this regard, the work of Chen Jianhua is particularly enlightening. As Chen argues, geming underwent a radical change during the late Qing through a series of Sino-Japanese-

European translations, evolving from a classical Confucian term that signified cyclical changes in dynasty mandated by Heaven, to a neologism (the classical term returned to

China with a new meaning by way of Japan) that conveyed a modern, universal sense of

“revolution” as a mass movement leading to historical progress.70 That is, geming was modernized and universalized – it no longer referred specifically to a Chinese derived from an ancient divination text, the Yi Jing (Book of Changes, tenth to fourth century B.C.), but to a historico-philosophical tradition with global ramifications launched by the French Revolution and steeped in French universalism. In the early twentieth century, Chinese revolution, Chinese geming, became linked to world revolution.

This new sense of geming as a fundamental break with the past, as an inevitable element of universal progress, and of democracy as the highest stage in the development of human government did not occur smoothly, but, leading up the 1911 Revolution, underwent a number of slippages and changes in meaning. In its original sense, geming as

70 See Chen, Jianhua. "Chinese ‘Revolution’ in the Syntax of World Revolution." Tokens of Exchange. Ed. Liu, Lydia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, p. 355-374. For a more detailed analysis, see Chen’s Geming de xiandai xing: Zhongguo geming huayu kaolun (A Study of Chinese Revolutionary Discourse and Modernity), Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000.

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described in The Book of Changes referred to legitimate dynastic overthrow: “Heaven and earth undergo their changes, and the four seasons complete their functions. The kings

Tang and Wu overthrew the thrones (geming) of Xia (2100-1600 B.C.) and Shang (1600-

1100 B.C.) in accordance with the will of Heaven, and in response to the wishes of men.

Great indeed is what takes place in a time of change.”71 The linking of the Tang-Wu

Revolution to changes in the four seasons, in the will of Heaven, and in the wishes of man legitimized geming on three levels: naturally, cosmologically, and socio-politically.

Although emperors of later dynasties, anxious to avoid being overthrown, called upon

Confucian scholars to reinterpret geming, this sense of revolution as a legitimate transfer of power ordained by Heaven, and driven by the people’s will lasted well into the late

Qing. It was through the historiographical problem of how to write about the transfer of power in entirely different political systems that forced East Asian scholars to reconfigure geming.

Prior to 1890, revolution in its modern sense was often translated as zaofan (revolt), panluan (armed rebellion), and described as bringing great luan (chaos), as seen in the earliest mention of Faguo geming 法國革命 (the standard modern translation for “French

Revolution”), Wang Tao’s Zhongding Faguo Zhi lue 重訂法國志略 (A Revised ).72 One of the first classically trained scholars to spend a considerable period of time in the West, Wang Tao (1828-1897) was an influential cultural mediator who was

71 James Legge, trans. The Book of Changes, Toronto: Bantam Books, 1986, p. 254. Cited in Chen, Jianhua. “Chinese ‘Revolution’”, p. 358.

72 The original text has been digitized and is accessible online through the Hathitrust Digital Library: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036848409;view=1up;seq=326

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among the first to translate Western ideas into Chinese, and Chinese classical texts into

Western languages.73 Having traveled to France during his extended stay in Europe as the

Scottish missionary and scholar James Legge’s collaborator, Wang Tao was impressed with French political, educational, legal, banking, and other institutions, which he praised in Faguo Zhi lue.74 First published in 1871, and expanded to twice its size in 1890, Faguo

Zhi lue was a popular text among educated elites, “a must-read for all reformers.”75 Wang based his text on Japanese translations of French and world history, which in general, displayed ambivalent attitudes towards the French Revolution, as well as toward the classical Chinese notion of geming.76 Faguo Zhi lue reflected this ambivalence, but also differed markedly from Japanese sources. On the one hand, Wang Tao accepts and

73 Wang Tao’s famous projects include his work with the London Missionary Society in translating the most widely circulated version of the Bible in China, and his collaboration with James Legge on the translation of the complete works of Confucius. Wang Tao was also a pioneering journalist and publisher; he co-founded the first successful Chinese newspaper completely under Chinese auspices in Hong Kong. See Cohen, Paul A. Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T'ao and Reform in Late Ch'ing China Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

74 Wang Tao especially admired the work of French sinologist Stanislas Julien, to whom he wrote seeking Julien’s collaboration on the French history project. Julien politely declined. See Cohen, Paul A. Between Tradition and Modernity, p. 124.

75 Chen, Jianhua, “World Revolution knocking at the Heavenly Gate: Kang Youwei and His Use of Geming in 1898.” Journal of Modern Chinese History, 2011, p. 98.

76 Among the most important Japanese histories translated into Chinese during the late Qing were Shibue Tamotsu’s The History of the French Revolution (translated by Zeng Ziyou, editor of Qimeng (Enlightenment) magazine, and published serially from December 1900 to March 1901), Nakae Tokusuke’s A Chronicle of France Two Centuries Before the French Revolution (originally published in 1886 and translated by Chinese students in exile in Japan in 1901) and Okuda Takematsu’s History of the French Revolution (translated by the Youth Society, a patriotic revolutionary group in Japan, and published by the Mingquan (People’s Rights) Publishing House in Shanghai in 1903). All three texts were translated by Chinese exiles and students in Japan, and helped to shape the public discourse on revolution, particularly the debates promoting reform versus revolution among Chinese radicals. Qimeng in particular was an important journal rediscovered, collected and compiled by Chen Kuangshi and Song Shufan in the late 1980s. One of the earliest journals to introduce translations of Western revolutionary ideas to Chinese audiences, Qimeng was one of the first to publish translated excerpts of Rousseau’s Social Contract and Nakae Tokusuke’s The of Civil Rights. Cf. Yu Danchu, “The Introduction and Influence of the Great French Revolution in China During the Early Years of the 20th Century” in China and the French Revolution: Proceedings of the International Conference, Shanghai, 18-21 March 1989, 75-84. 39

repeats, almost verbatim, his Japanese sources in describing the process of revolution as

“ran” (disaster, luan), and the restoration of Louis XVIII to the throne as “kakumei”

(revolution, geming). On the other hand, he rejects the Japanese praise of militarism, and considers French militarism a “disease” transmitted to the Japanese.77

Wang Tao’s conflation of revolution and restoration – the actual outbreak of revolution in 1789 describes how the people of Paris “made a revolt” (zuoluan), and geming is not mentioned until the chapter on the Bourbon Restoration – reflected the

Japanese conflation of the two terms. As Chen Jianhua notes, since contemporary Japan, unlike China with its multiple dynasties, had been ruled by a single imperial house,

Japanese intellectuals altered both the classical Chinese meaning of geming (righteous dynastic overthrow), and the Western notion of a radical regime change essential to historical progress, emphasizing instead a concept of restoration that would strengthen the existing Japanese empire. 78 Subsequent late Qing intellectuals would persist in employing similar descriptions, referring to the revolutionary masses led by Robespierre and Danton as luanmin (rebellious mob), and luandang (rebellious party). Even Sun

Zhongshan was referred to well into the early 1900s as the leader of a feidang (bandit gang) rather than as the head of a revolutionary alliance.

Sun did not refer to himself as a “revolutionist” or his cause as “revolutionary” until

1895, when, during his exile in Japan after a failed coup attempt, he found himself described as the leader of a revolutionary party (kakumei to) in a Kobe newspaper. Sun

77 See Cohen, Paul A. Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T'ao and Reform in Late Ch'ing, 1974.

78 In Chen Dianhua, “World Revolution knocking at the Heavenly Gate,” p. 98.

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then purportedly remarked to a comrade, “The word geming [kakumei] is rooted in the Yi

Jing. Kings Tang and Wu made revolutions according to the will of heaven and people

[…] From now on we can call our party geming dang 革命黨.” 79 Appropriating geming for the anti-Manchu movement, Sun legitimized his attempt to overthrow the Qing by linking his uprising to the classical Chinese notion of a virtuous, Heaven-mandated revolution. By the turn of the twentieth century, the meaning of geming was in flux: it concurrently referred to Sun Zhongshan’s anti-Manchu cause, Japan’s Meiji Restoration, and righteous dynastic overthrow.

Interestingly, it was constitutional monarchists such as the prominent late Qing scholar Kang Youwei (1858-1927) and his disciple Liang Qichao (1873-1929), who would ultimately, inadvertently, do the most to remove resistance to and legitimize revolution by helping to shift the very meaning of geming in public discourse. Kang

Youwei, for example, uses the “calamity” and “tragedy” of the French Revolution primarily as a negative example. Warning the Emperor Guangxu against the excesses of the French Revolution in July 1898, Kang writes,

The whole of France was bleeding. In Paris, 1.29 million people died in 100 days, during which revolts broke out three times. The calamity even stretched into the 30 years after the monarchy was overthrown. During that period, hundreds of thousands of nobles, millions of wealthy people and tens of millions of common people suffered in the chaos … The unprecedented tragedy shocked the whole world. From then on monarchs were thrown into constant fear and the people into constant war in Europe…. No killings and riots in human history could have been as cruel and violent as these revolutions, which all originated in France.80

79 Cited in Chen Jianhua, "Chinese "Revolution" in the Syntax of World Revolution,” p. 364. See also Harold Z. Schiffrin, Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution, p. 98-100.

80 Cited in Zhang Kaiyuan, “The French Revolution and China’s 1911 Revolution” in China and the French Revolution: Proceedings of the International Conference, Shanghai, 18-21 March 1989, 119-128, p. 120. See also Tang Zhijun, ed. Kang Youwei Zheng lun ji (Political Essays of Kang Youwei), Zhonghua Press, 1981, vol. 1. 41

While Kang’s exaggerated statistics and impassioned rhetoric may reveal more about his tactics of persuasion than his grasp of European history, Kang nonetheless concedes, “the recent upsurge of constitutionalism has its roots in the French Revolution. Though it is extremely unruly, revolution has become a general trend followed by millions of people.

It is like overwhelming tides spreading over the land, formidable and irresistible.”81 For

Kang Youwei, the French Revolution is simultaneously a bloodbath to be avoided, and utterly unavoidable. Nevertheless, it led to constitutionalism, a path he heartily encourages the Emperor to undertake during the Hundred Days Reform. Kang also paradoxically idealizes French democracy, brought to fruition by the French Revolution, as belonging to the Age of Universal Peace (Taiping shi 太平時), the most perfect stage in his modernized adaptation of Confucius’ Three Ages Theory (San shi 三時 ).

Even more curious than Kang Youwei’s simultaneous disavowal and legitimization of the French Revolution in the 1898 Reform Memorials is his careful avoidance of the word geming. Although the Draft Memorials of 1898 (Wuxu zougao 戊戌奏稿), the standard source for the study of Kang Youwei and the 1898 reform movement include texts containing the term geming, recent studies suggest that a number of memorials and prefaces were revised or forged after the reform failed and Kang fled abroad.82 Chen

Jianhua’s comparison of texts verified as “authentic” by Qing court archives, and those suspected to be revised or “inauthentic,” reveals that Kang strategically employed terms

81 Ibid.

82 Kang Youwei, Wuxu zougao (Draft Memorials of 1898), : Wenhai chubanshe, 1911, reprint 1985.

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such as bianfa 變法 (changes in law), bianzheng 變政(changes in political institutions), and weixin 維新 (reform, modernization) instead of geming.83 For instance, Kang submitted the Mingzhi bianzheng kao (A Study of the Meiji Reformation) without any mention of geming in either the book or its preface, and in a memorial dated April 10,

1898, he mentions in passing a study he planned to submit titled, Faguo bianzheng kao

(A Study of Political Change in France).84 This substitution was not due to lack of awareness of geming and Faguo geming, given his familiarity with popular histories of the French Revolution translated from Japanese. Kang Youwei, in his positive appraisals of parliamentary democracy and calls for radical reform clearly had revolution in the back of his mind. So why does he omit geming in his submitted memorials?

While I agree with Chen Jianhua that he likely wished to avoid offending the

Emperor, I would add that the omission reflected the clash between the various “worlds of thinking,” both native and foreign, that Kang Youwei found himself enmeshed in and was responding to. Since revolutionary discourse in China had its origins in the

Confucian classics, and had been mediated for centuries by (among other schools of thought) the New Text School (jingxue), which was predominant during the late Qing,

Kang was, on the one hand, drawing upon a native, classical tradition in an effort to preserve aspects of that practice. On the other hand, geming, as an important term for

83 For an overview of recent scholarship revealing that several of the prefaces included in Kang Youwei’s Draft Memorials of 1898 were forged or revised at a later date, see Chen Jianhua. "World Revolution Knocking at the Heavenly Gate," p. 96-100.

84 Ibid, p. 97.

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radical political change, had to be reinterpreted in light of China’s contemporary situation and its growing awareness of other traditions and histories. Late Qing intellectuals like

Kang Youwei furthermore had to navigate between multiple layers of mediation across several languages. Given the New Text debates over geming, as well as Sun Zhongshan’s appropriation of the term for the revolutionary cause, Kang likely wished to distinguish his proposals for reform from Sun’s anti-Manchu movement as well as from any reference to dynastic change. Ultimately, Kang Youwei’s substitution of geming with less provocative terms like bianfa and bianzheng reflected not just an awareness of his audience’s sensibilities and Qing court politics, but points to differences between Chinese and Japanese interpretations of geming, as well as between Chinese and Japanese perceptions of Europe and the French Revolution.

Even having omitted the incendiary term geming, however, Kang Youwei’s reform memorials were considered treasonous, and he was sentenced to death after Empress

Dowager Cixi’s suppression of the Hundred Days Reform movement. Kang went into exile and continued his calls for constitutional monarchy through a series of articles in

Xinmin Conbao 新民叢報 (New Citizen Journal). Founded in Tokyo by Liang Qichao,

Kang’s leading disciple, Xinmin was the major organ of the reform movement and one of the most widely read journals of the time. In “Faguo geming shi lun” 法國革命釋論 (On the History of the French Revolution), Kang warned once more against imitating the excesses of the French Revolution, while simultaneously praising its great achievement

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of securing “freedom and equality” (ziyou pingdeng 自由平等) for the common people.85

These attempts at curbing the anti-Manchu movement through public discourse, however, sparked a series of counter-arguments in the Tokyo-based pro-revolution journal, Minbao

民報 (People’s Journal) that would ultimately help seal the demise of the reform campaign.86

It was Kang Youwei’s illustrious protégé Liang Qichao (1873-1929) who would modernize geming most fully, linking it to a Darwinian concept of evolution, and modern historical consciousness, as well as expanding the concept to include not only political but also social and cultural change.87 A prolific scholar, journalist, translator, and novelist, Liang Qichao, like Kang Youwei, was ambivalent about the French Revolution, and advocated reforms modeled after Meiji Japan. On the one hand, he saw the French

Revolution as dangerous and destabilizing, and preferred constitutional monarchy to a republic. On the other, as one of the first Chinese intellectuals to consider rights (quanli) consciousness in a sustained way, he was an admirer of the principles set forth in the

Declaration of the Rights of Man. In his promotion of the Meiji Restoration as an

85 See Ming Yi (Kang Youwei), “Faguo geming shi lun” (“On the History of the French Revolution”), Xinmin Congbao 85 (August 1906), 87 (September 1906); and Kang Youwei, “Nanhai xiansheng bian geming shu” (A Letter from Mr. Nanhai Arguing Over the Issue of Revolution), Xinmin Congbao 16 (September 1902): 59-69.

86 Under the editorial guidance of Zhang , the rebuttals were penned isn an impressive classical style by Wang Dong, a seventeen-year-old Chinese revolutionary studying at Waseda University, and published in six editions of Minbao from January 1907 to February 1908. See Jisheng (Wang Dong), “A Critique of Mingyi (Kang Youwei) on the History of the French Revolution” and “ on the History of the French Revolution” in Minbao 11 (25 January 1907) p. 55-76; 13 (5 May 1907) p. 59-74; 15 (5 July 1907) p. 101-118; 16 (25 September 1907) p. 73-92; 18 (25 December 1907) p. 31-46; and 19 (25 February 1908), p. 43-60.

87 Chen Jianhua, "Chinese ‘Revolution’ in the Syntax of World Revolution" in Tokens of Exchange, p. 355- 374.

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alternative to the anti-Manchu movement, Liang repeated and reinscribed in Chinese the common Japanese slippage between kakumei (geming, revolution) and gaikaku (gaige, reform). As Chen Jianhua notes, the Meiji period was commonly referred to in Japanese texts as kakumei jidai (the revolutionary era), the Meiji Restoration eulogized as ishin dai kakumei (reformation as great revolution), and occasionally, the term was translated as

“changes in all societal affairs.”88 In Liang’s 1902 article “Shi ge” 釋革 (An explanation of the meaning of revolution), Liang suggests substituting for geming and its connotations of violence and terror the broader and rather toothless term, biange

(transformation, change):

Extinction and change occur not only in political but various other realms of worldly affairs. There are Japanese translated terms, such as religious revolution, moral revolution, academic revolution, literary revolution, custom revolution, and industrial revolution. In the favorite terms of today’s youth, revolution can occur everywhere: classics, historiography, prose, poetry, drama, fiction, music, language, and so on. So why can we not call all these geming when they have nothing to do with dynastic changes? Those who fear geming would do well to know that its real meaning is biange 變革.89

In claiming that geming can be used interchangeably with biange, Liang, more than any of his contemporaries, unmoored geming from its classical Chinese meaning. He further linked geming to China’s survival in a world governed by Darwinian principles of natural selection, arguing, “If the people want to survive, they must effect great change and take action immediately. If the monarch and officials want to survive and win people’s favor,

88 Ibid, p. 366.

89 “Shi ge” (An explanation of the meaning of revolution) in Xinmin Congbao 22 (February 1902): 4. Cited in Chen Jianhua, p. 365-369.

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they must not fear great change, but promote it.”90 In Liang’s use, geming is no longer associated with cyclical dynastic changes, but assimilated into a concept of biological and historical determinism. Revolution, as biange, change, is seen as inevitable and driven by processes of natural selection.91

During his exile in Japan after the failed Hundred Days Reform, Liang founded two journals in 1902 reflecting the main elements he saw as essential to China’s survival in a competition of the survival of the fittest, Xinmin 新民 (New Citizen) and Xin xiaoshuo 新

小說 (New Fiction). Believing that “to transform the people of a country, the only way is to first transform the country’s fiction,” Liang promoted the translation of foreign texts as the most effective means of revolutionizing , which in turn would change Chinese consciousness, and lead to progressive, free-thinking individuals who would bring about China’s salvation.92 Liang, in contrast to Kang Youwei, spent most of his years in exile (1899 to 1911) in Japan, where he learned to read Japanese, and met many Japanese scholars and political figures. Yet, like Kang, most of his ideas about

Meiji Japan preceded his sojourn. Meiji Japan was an imagined construct that served as an envisaged solution to Qing-era China’s problems. Whether consciously or unintentionally noting the primacy of the imagination in effecting reform, Liang began to link literature and national salvation, literature and geming as early as 1899, when he

90 Ibid.

91 On the impact of in China, see James Pusey, China and . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

92 See Liang Qichao’s 1902 essay, “On the Relationship Between Fiction and Social Order” (Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi) in Liang Qichao xuanji. Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1984. Cited in Wong Wang- Chi, Lawrence. “The Sole Purpose is to Express My Political Views”: Liang Qichao and the Translation and Writing of Political Novels in the Late Qing” in Translation and Creation, p. 106.

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coined the terms shijie geming (poetry revolution), and wenjie geming (prose revolution).93 Ironically, his call for a revolution in literature would set the stage for the iconoclastic New Culture and May Fourth movements that attempted to create China anew, starting with the wholesale rejection of .

Although the interlingual slippage between revolution, rebellion, and reform stalled the acceptance of geming as a household term, by the time of the 1911 Xinhai

Revolution, it would come to signify not only dynastic overthrow but also the installation of a modern nation-state. The interlingual slippage of geming originated in and helped to shape the animated debates of the period between supporters of reform and those of revolution. The call for change grew increasingly urgent as foreign imperialist powers converged on China, carving up the country into European, American and Japanese spheres of influence. China’s humiliating defeat in 1895 at the hands of Japan sparked a public protest – stretching nearly a third of a mile long in front of the Qing Censorate – that led to the Hundred Days Reform movement.94 Although the suppression of the

Hundred Days Reform led to the arrest and death, or exile of leading reformists, the movement marked a pivotal shift in how Chinese intellectuals conceived of the relationship between a country’s ruler and its people. Since 1898, as Peter Zarrow writes,

Chinese leaders have had to “justify their rule in terms of representing the nation,” to the extent that “even the most dictatorial regime has claimed to rule in the name of the

93 The terms first appeared in his travel diary, Hanman lu (A Record of Travel) in December 1899.

94 The protest, led by Kang Youwei, marked the first time significant numbers of people outside the imperial bureaucracy took part in politics and attempted to influence the government. It was in this context that a new political terminology emerged. Terms such as ‘citizen,’ ‘sovereignty,’ and ‘constitution’ began to enter daily usage. See Nathan, Andrew J. Chinese Democracy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

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people.”95 Even though Kang and Liang did not directly challenge imperial rule, they helped to desacralize monarchy by emphasizing the idea of people’s power (minquan) as a crucial element of good government.

In the wake of the failed Hundred Days Reform, and the huge indemnities the

Boxer Rebellion incurred for the Qing government, Sun Zhongshan’s anti-Manchu revolution gained momentum. Many of the suppressed reforms were belatedly revived and instituted in a last-ditch effort to quell popular unrest. The resulting tension between the concept of an all-powerful monarch, and new structures that acknowledged the sovereignty of the people further eroded the absolute power of the monarchy. When the dynasty fell in 1911, however, the newly established Republic proved no more capable of fending off foreign, especially Japanese aggression than the Qing. Early Republican

China, wavering between imperial restoration and military rule, was a chaotic mix of warlords, secret societies, and an authoritarian but weak government. The failure of the

1911 Revolution to achieve a stable democracy led to a shift in focus in Chinese revolutionary discourse from political to social and cultural revolution. Mediated largely through anarchist thought and practice, this anarchist turn in some ways echoed Kang’s promotion of datong (great unity), as well as, in a broad sense, Liang Qichao’s call for a transformation in popular consciousness through intellectual and cultural change, but also departed from Kang and Liang’s criticism of the French Revolution. Francophiles as diverse as Chen Duxiu, father of the New Culture movement and co-founder of the

Chinese Communist Party, and Li Shizeng, a leading anarchist and later one of the “Four

95 After Empire, p. 25.

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Elders” of the Nationalist Guomindang Party, took the French Republic as their model of an ideal, democratic civilization. Fundamental to anarchist thinking was the popularization of a new rights consciousness that had emerged in the late Qing.96

Datong大同 and Quanli 權利: The Emergence of a Rights Discourse

In an essay titled “The French and Modern Civilization” (Falanxi ren yu jinshi wenming) published in the first issue of 新青年 (Xin qingnian), the magazine said to have launched the New Culture Movement, Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) extols the virtues of “modern civilization” inaugurated by the French Revolution:

Modern civilization has three characteristics that played the greatest roles in changing the way (dao 道) of ancient [civilization], and, thus, in marking a new era in human thought and society. These are the ideas of human rights (renquan ⼈權), evolutionism, and socialism. Prior to the French Revolution, all European nations were founded on the privileges (tequan 特權) of the monarchs and aristocrats. Only members of this minority were regarded as individuals with independent and free personalities (renge ⼈格). The majority of people were the slaves of those with privileges … Since The Declaration of the Rights of Man … was published in 1789 by Lafayette, the author of the American Declaration of Independence, the Europeans awakened, as if from a dream or drunken stupor, and recognized the value of human rights. They rose up and fought against their monarchs, threw down the aristocracies, and established constitutions… The ability of humans to be persons (weiren 偉⼈) and not to sink forever into slavery – is this not a gift of the French?97

96 Whether or not China possessed a rights tradition before the introduction of an explicit rights vocabulary through the translation of Western texts in the nineteenth century has been much debated. The point here is that a new kind of rhetoric emerged via the translation of foreign terms and texts.

97 My italics. “Falanxiren yu jinshi wenming” (The French and Modern Civilization) in Xin qingnian (New Youth) 1:1, 1915. Reprinted in Chen Duxiu wenzhang xuanbian (Selected Essays by Chen Duxiu), Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1984, vol. 1, p. 79-81. English translation in Angle, Stephen C. and Marina Svensson, eds. The Chinese Human Rights Reader: Documents and Commentary, 1900-2000. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001, p. 63-64. 50

Writing in the wake of Yuan Shikai’s attempted imperial restoration and Japan’s humiliating Twenty One Demands of 1915,98 Chen Duxiu was employing a rhetoric of human rights to critique the Chinese state. In doing so, he was participating in a new discourse that Peter Zarrow has termed “rights talk.” As Zarrow argues, “rights talk” spread rapidly during the late Qing, taking hold among reformers, revolutionaries, as well as political elites because “it was a powerful tool for the critique of Qing despotism as well as for the building of a modern state.”99 If the return neologism geming ⾰命 prepared the ground for revolution, the new concept of quanli 權利 was central to the revolutionary discourse that led to the toppling of the Qing. Rights (quanli), like revolution (geming), had undergone a radical transvaluation during the late Qing. The term was first translated consistently as quan and quanli – which combined “power”

(quan 權) and “profit” (li 利) – in W.A.P. Martin’s Chinese translation of Wheaton’s

International Law (Wangguo gongfa 王國公法) in 1864.100 Both quan and li carried a

98 Stipulating the expansion and acquisition of Japanese territories and spheres of influence in Manchuria, and , the construction of three railroads, as well as effective Japanese control of China’s finances and police, the Twenty-One Demands basically attempted to turn China into a Japanese colony, inciting nationalist outrage and fueling diverse calls for revolution.

99 Zarrow, Peter. "Anti-Despotism and "Rights Talk": The Intellectual Origins of Modern Human Rights Thinking in the Late Qing." Modern China Vol. 34.No. 2 (Apr. 2008): 179-209, p. 179.

100 See Lydia Liu. “Legislating the Universal: The Circulation of International Law in the Nineteenth Century” in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, p. 127-164.

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negative connotation in Chinese, often associated with quanshi 權勢 (power/domination), and with commercial interests as signified by li. After the Sino-Japanese War, and the proliferation of translations of liberal Western political thinkers by Yan Fu (1853-1921), and by Japanese translators, quanli was increasingly used to refer to legitimate political rights, and eventually, related terms like zizhu zhi quan ⾃主之權 (the power/quan of the self) and minquan 民權 (the power/quan of the people) were used to refer to individual autonomy, popular power, and even loosely, “democracy.”101 The new meaning and valence of quan and quanli would be naturalized through repeated use. Disseminated and institutionalized through Qing administrative reforms, and contemporary ideologies such as liberalism, anarchism, socialism, evolutionism (), and so forth, rights became generally accepted “as part of a package that included , citizenship, and constitutionalism as well as nationalism.”102 Although prior to 1890, rights was of limited interest and made little sense to who believed in the power of the emperor to maintain order and justice (ren, 仁, benevolence), by the time

Chen Duxiu referred to renquan (⼈權, human rights) in 1915, the pursuit of rights had become a common element of diverse radical discourses.

The earliest, most prominent “rights” thinkers were reform rather than revolution-

101 See ibid, and Peter Zarrow. "Anti-Despotism and "Rights Talk": The Intellectual Origins of Modern Human Rights Thinking in the Late Qing." Modern China Vol. 34.No. 2 (Apr. 2008): 179-209.

102 Peter Zarrow. "Anti-Despotism and "Rights Talk”, p. 184.

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minded. In this regard, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao were instrumental in legitimizing a nascent quanli discourse, as they had been in developing the related geming discourse.

Both Kang and Liang’s thinking on rights reflected their classical training, as well as their engagement with non-native sources. Kang Youwei linked universal moral such as the Confucian ren 仁(benevolence) to equality among humans. He envisioned an egalitarian society of Great Unity (Datong) that would achieve renmin quanli ⼈民權利

(the rights of the people) under progressively more free and equal forms of society – from the constraints imposed by autocratic states, to equal rights (albeit with racial disparities) under democratic , and finally to the “breaking down [of all] boundaries”

(jie 界) in a stateless society featuring absolute equality.103 Kang Youwei’s datong combined Confucian ethics with Western political ideals of liberty and equality. This proto-anarchist, communal ideal, as Dirlik writes, “drew its name and virtues from a native Chinese utopian tradition, but already its inspiration came from the future – a future, moreover that transcended China’s own world and took as its scope the global society of which China had just become an integral part.”104 In other words, the development of a rights discourse was shaped by indigenous concepts as well as by

Chinese understanding of Western and Japanese notions of rights. This did not mean,

103 Kang Youwei. Da tong shu. Shanghai: Shanghai shu dian, 1991. The book was published posthumously in 1935, although the first two chapters were published in Tokyo in the 1900s, and Kang’s students were familiar with its ideas from his lectures.

104 Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 55.

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however, that Western-Japanese discourses were simply transformed to meet local needs.

Both indigenous and imported concepts were constantly evolving as intellectuals adjusted their interpretations to address contemporary concerns. As Stephen Angle puts it,

“Chinese rights discourse should be understood as an ongoing creative achievement, rather than a reaction to, or misunderstanding of Western ideas and institutions.”105 In the context of late Qing China, this meant the ongoing (re)assessment of China’s present as well as its future as one society among many in a new global world order.

While Kang envisioned an egalitarian society of great unity, Liang began thinking about rights in relation to a system of law in a series of articles written during his exile in

Japan called Xin min shuo 新民說 (On the New People). In an essay published in 1902, he advocated the development of a Chinese rights consciousness: “If one wants to attain

[rights], if one wants to preserve [rights], then the place to begin is truly with rights consciousness (quanli sixiang 權利思想).”106 Liang further insisted that “rights consciousness” is natural: “when people are born they are endowed with (tianfu 天賦) rights consciousness, which is due to innate good-knowing (liangzhi 良知) and good

105 My italics. Angle, Stephen. Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 2.

106 Liang Qichao, “Lun quanli sixiang” (On Rights Consciousness) in Xin min shuo (On the New People), originally published in Xinmin Congbao, 1902-03. Reprinted in Yinbingshi quanji (Complete Works from an Ice-Drinker’s Studio), Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1989. English version in Angle, Stephen C. and Marina Svensson, eds. The Chinese Human Rights Reader:Documents and Commentary, 1900-2000. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001, p. 5-15, p. 8.

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ability (liangneng 良能).”107 Although Liang considered rights consciousness to be natural, or heaven-born (tianfu 天賦), it can be weakened and lost (as in the case of the

Qing dynasty) through continuous despotic rule. This loss of rights consciousness in turn leads to inequality between persons and between societies:

If one observes the histories of nations that have been destroyed – whether Eastern or Western, ancient or modern – one sees that, in the beginning, there have always been a few resisting tyrannical rule and seeking freedom. Again and again, the government seeks to weed out [those resisting its tyrannical rule], and gradually those resisting get weaker, have [their resolve] melt away, until eventually that violent, intoxicating rights consciousness comes increasingly under control, is ever more diluted and thin, to the point that any possibility of a return to its former strength is forgotten and it is permanently under control. After a few decades or centuries of this situation, rights consciousness will have completely disappeared.108

In some ways drawing upon Kang Youwei’s reworking of Confucian datong, Liang, nevertheless, by no means advocated a stateless society. On the contrary, he saw rights consciousness as essential to developing a strong nation-state in a competitive world.

Linking the Mencian notions of liangzhi and liangneng to the social Darwinism of Katō

Hiroyuki and the positive legalism of Rudolf von Jhering, Liang stressed the need of individuals and nations to struggle for their rights in the name of survival and social progress. In this regard, it is interesting that Liang proposed a natural “rights consciousness” rather than a concept of “natural rights.” In fact, Liang rejected “natural rights;” for Liang, while the desire for rights was natural, rights themselves were not natural but rooted in law. An individual or a state’s rights, or claims to its interests, had to

107 Ibid (Angle and Svensson, transl.), p. 13.

108 Ibid.

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be constantly struggled for in a world in which “might makes right” (qiangquan zhuyi 強

權主義).109

Anarchism as Mode of Translation: Rights and Revolution in Theory and Practice

At the same time that Kang Youwei was completing his utopian work Datong Shu

大同書 (Book of the Great Unity) in India, and Liang Qichao was promoting rights consciousness in Tokyo, “rights talk” was further naturalized by two separate groups of overseas radicals who began elaborating a distinctly anarchist vision of rights and revolution that drew from eclectic Asian and European traditions. Based in Paris and

Tokyo, respectively, these anarchist groups were among the first Chinese intellectuals to establish political study societies abroad.110 The first of these groups founded the Shijie she 世界社 (World Society) in Paris in 1906. Led by Li Shizeng (1881-1973) and Wu

Zhihui (1865-1953), the World Society and its major organ, 新世紀 (New

Century) served as an important bridge between Chinese and European anarchism. A few months later in 1907, the exiled classical scholar Liu Shipei (1884-1919) and his wife,

109 See Liang Qichao, “Lun qiangqun” (On the Right of the Strongest) in Ziyou shu (The Book of Freedom). Reprinted in Yinbingshi quanji (Complete Works from an Ice-Drinker’s Studio), Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1989.

110 There was another important group of mostly younger anarchists based in Canton province and later Beijing led by (1884-1915). Very active in and labor organization, China-based anarchists founded the first labor unions in China, including the Canton Teahouse Labor Union, the Barbers Union, and the Mechanics Union.

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He-Yin Zhen (1884-1920?), established the Shehui zhuyi hui 社會主義講習會

(Society for the Study of Socialism) and began publishing Tianyi bao 天義報 (Natural

Justice) in Tokyo.

Although the two groups had many differences – the Francophile World Society in general promoted a forward-looking anarchism emphasizing scientific progress while the

Tokyo-based group idealized Chinese agrarian societies of old – they overlapped in their fundamental principles, kept track of each other’s activities, and sometimes reprinted articles that had first appeared in the other journal.111 They were instrumental in shaping a number of important discursive formations (“rights talk”, education as revolution), as well as revolutionary practices (, mass protest, programs linking labor and learning). Most significantly, anarchism provided Chinese radicals of diverse persuasions with a powerful, new language and vocabulary with which to think about the contemporary global situation. It is in this sense that I see anarchism as a crucial mode of translation during its heyday between 1905 and 1930.112 Derived from native (familiar) and foreign (new) traditions, and invented in a transnational environment, Chinese anarchism was more than the sum of its parts. As Dirlik has cogently argued, anarchist ideology was at the core of an extremely diffuse and diverse combination of ideas that

111 See Dirlik, Arif. "The New Culture Movement Revisited: Anarchism and the Idea of Social Revolution in New Culture Thinking." Modern China Vol. 11. No. 3 (July 1985): 251-300; Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991; and Zarrow, Peter. Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

112 By 1920, as Dirlik notes, anarchist literature was unparalleled in scope and comprehensiveness. See "The New Culture Movement Revisited” (July 1985).

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marked the New Culture and May Fourth eras.113

Fundamental to anarchist philosophy was its rethinking of rights; anarchists helped to naturalize “rights talk” by creating a of how to balance different kinds of rights in a vastly unequal world of competing interests. As Zarrow writes, “the fundamental anarchist argument might even be reduced to rights: it is because humans could not be legitimately deprived of their rights (liberty) that all systems of rule and exploitation were immoral. Authority in all its forms – the state, the family, capitalism, landlordism, even representative democracy – deserved to be overthrown and replaced by freely cooperating social units.”114 On the most basic level, anarchism emphasized individual liberation from coercive social institutions – in particular, the state and the family – which were seen as corrupting influences. Founded on a basic belief in human goodness, anarchist philosophy held that, once freed from the shackles of authority, man would be restored to his natural (moral) self. In ’s words,

Anarchism … really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of ; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.115

This egalitarian vision resonated with Chinese intellectuals’ concerns about their place

113 See ibid.

114 Peter Zarrow. "Anti-Despotism and "Rights Talk": The Intellectual Origins of Modern Human Rights Thinking in the Late Qing." Modern China Vol. 34.No. 2 (Apr. 2008): 179-209, p. 189.

115 Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Dover Publications, 1917, reprint 1969.

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within Chinese society, and China’s place in the world at a time when both were contested; it also resonated with classical notions of datong (great unity). Anarchism emphasized the unity of all humanity at a time when imperialist and colonial aggression was dividing the world into stronger and weaker, “modern” and “backwards” nations and races. This was a radically different solution to the problems of global modernity than that promoted by race-conscious anti-Manchu nationalists116, by liberals, or later, by

Marxists. It was a vision of revolution that was fundamentally anti-nationalist, anti-state, anti-military, and anti-political – insofar as was rejected as “a revolution of the few.”117 Paradoxically, however, it emerged and developed concurrently with nationalism, and Chinese anarchist projects overlapped with nation-building projects.

In the early twentieth century, anarchism linked an emergent Chinese nationalism to broader, global sociopolitical problems (namely extensive socioeconomic inequalities and the exploitation of “weaker” countries by stronger ones) created by capitalist modernity. Both Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui had joined Sun Zhongshan’s revolutionary

Tongmenghui (Alliance League) while in Paris, and Liu Shipei was a fervent nationalist, although he would return to China as an agent-provocateur for the Qing government in

1908, and would later support Yuan Shikai’s attempt to become emperor.118 Anarchists shared with nationalists a desire to strengthen the nation, and free China from conditions

116 This Han nationalist view was most strikingly promoted by Zou Rong’s famous tract, “Revolutionary Army” (1903). The eighteen-year old Zou called for the violent overthrow of the alien and barbaric Manchu race and the restoration of the natural rights (tianfu renquan) of the Han people.

117 Dirlik, Arif. "The New Culture Movement Revisited” (July 1985), p. 275.

118 Dirlik, Arif. “Vision and Revolution.” 59

of semi-colonialism. But in contrast to nationalist discourses promoting political revolution, anarchist ideology was ethical and existential in nature, promoting a revolution that reimagined the individual’s relationship to society; anarchist revolution was essentially social and cultural. Among the first to criticize Confucianism, discuss feminism, and promote language reform, Chinese anarchists were invested in a revolution that would fundamentally transform society by transforming everyday life and social institutions.

In some ways, the concurrent emergence of anarchism and Chinese nationalism was anomalous, for the central problem facing China at the time was often framed as how to create the material conditions of “wealth and power” (fuqiang 富強) necessary to assert political sovereignty. If the prevalent nationalist discourse emphasized the pursuit of wealth and power, anarchist visions of a world free of power struggles and hierarchies would seem to contradict nationalist aims. The very existence of suggests, as Dirlik has argued, that revolutionary discourse was by no means reducible to a search for wealth and political power.119 In making both individual and collective rights

“central to the project of building a stateless society on principles of justice,”120 anarchist discourse pointed to “a new kind of universalism,” a vision of “ a world in which nations would once again disappear and humankind would discover a new kind of unity.”121

Other universalisms would emerge – socialism, and communism for example – to rival

119 See Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

120 Peter Zarrow. "Anti-Despotism and "Rights Talk”, p. 189.

121 Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, p. 50.

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and eventually overtake anarchism. Anarchists were in effect “midwives to the social radicalism that was to burst forth on the Chinese scene” in the coming decade. Ironically, anarchism laid the seeds for the flourishing of communism that would spell its own demise.122

Despite their common ideological principles, the solutions proposed by the Tokyo and Paris anarchists were dramatically different. Tokyo-based classical scholar, and leader of the national essence (guocui 國粹) movement, Liu Shipei advocated an anarchism in Natural Justice that was deeply rooted in premodern native utopian ideologies, including elements of Confucianism, Daoism and .123 But he also turned to non-native sources such as Tolstoy and Rousseau. Whether or not, as it has been argued, he saw elements of Tolstoy’s idealization of rural life and manual labor, and

Rousseau’s concept of a social contract in premodern Chinese thought, one can conversely argue that echoes of Rousseau’s “general will” can be found in Liu’s articulation of a Chinese social contract: “If one can extend one’s self-interest to others

(empathy), then the boundaries between the social whole (gong 共) and the individual (si

122 Both the Communist Manifesto and the Russian Revolution were introduced to China through anarchist journals. Although there was much overlap among radical groups in the early 1900s, anarchists and communists began to articulate distinct identities around 1916, and by the late 1920s, they would become hostile rivals. The triumph of the CCP would in turn relegate anarchism to a petit bourgeois school of thought in Communist historiography. Dirlik, Arif. “The New Culture Movement Revisited: Anarchism and the Idea of Social Revolution in New Culture Thinking." Modern China Vol. 11. No. 3 (July 1985): 251-300, p. 296.

123 See Arif Dirlik, "Vision and Revolution: Anarchism in Chinese Revolutionary Thought on the Eve of the 1911 Revolution." Modern China 12.No. 2 (April 1986): 123-65.

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私) will disappear.”124 Liu saw rights/quanli as rooted in natural desires, but given the social nature of human , rights would need to be balanced with duties:

Humankind has three basic rights: equality, independence, and liberty. Equality consists of everyone having the same rights and duties; independence consists of neither enslaving others nor depending on others; and liberty consists of being neither controlled by nor enslaved by others. We consider these rights to be natural (tianfu). Independence and liberty treat the individual as the basic unit; equality must be considered in terms of humankind as a whole… Independence is what maintains equality. However, since the excessive exercise of the liberties of one conflicts with the liberties of another, and since the liberties of one tend to conflict with the overall goal of equality, individual liberties must be limited.125

In Liu Shipei’s anarchist understanding of rights and social contract, liberty was as important as equality. For Liu, the ideals of liberty and equality would be best achieved through the establishment of rural , and the participation of all in manual labor, a goal that likely inspired later Communist thinking about the relationship between agriculture and society, and urban and rural regions. Liu was criticized by the Paris anarchists for looking to the Chinese past, and advocating native utopias; yet, Natural

Justice’s analyses of social and political problems such as the questions of militarism, labor, women, and peasants were prescient, and more concrete than anything put forth by the New Century anarchists, as will be evident in the next chapter. On one hand, Liu

“perceived anarchism only as a modern version of a rural utopianism that had long

124 My italics. Liu Shipei. Zhongguo minyue jingyi (Essentials of the Chinese Social Contract) in Liu Shipei quanji (Collected Works of Liu Shipei) vol. I. Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1997, p. 560-96, p. 566. Cited in Zarrow, "Anti-Despotism and "Rights Talk”, p. 189-190.

125 Liu Shipei. “Wuzhengfu zhuyi zhi pingdeng quan” (The Anarchist View on Equality), p. 918-32, vol. 2b in Zhang Nan and Wang Renzhi, eds. Xinhai geming qian shinian jian shilun xuanji (Selected topical writings from the decade before the 1911 Revolution). Beijing: Sanlian shudian. Cited in Zarrow, “Anti- Despotism and “Rights Talk,” p. 190.

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existed in China;”126 on the other, he was possibly “the first Chinese intellectual to see in socialism a means to liberate China from western oppression.”127 This tension, I believe, underscores the fact that Chinese anarchists were not simply “backward-looking,” or

“forward-looking” as has been claimed; rather, they drew upon China’s past and present, upon several different “worlds of thinking,” both foreign and native, to envision a future wholly different from the struggle for wealth and power advanced by the imperialist powers.

In Paris, the New Century anarchists neither approved of their Tokyo counterparts’ focus on rural agrarian utopias, nor, as cosmopolitan Francophiles, were they particularly attentive to the anti-imperialism question.128 In general, they saw modern urban life as a corrective rather than corrupting influence. Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between the two groups more evident than in Wu Zhihui’s description of utopia in which science and urban industry, and futuristic mechanical inventions take center stage.129 In the New

Century view, economic and social progress would be achieved through scientific

126 Dirlik, Arif. "Vision and Revolution: Anarchism in Chinese Revolutionary Thought on the Eve of the 1911 Revolution." Modern China 12.No. 2 (April 1986): 123-65, p. 149.

127 Ibid., p. 152. Anarchists were not, however, the first to advocate social revolution in China. Sun Zhongshan’s Tongmenghui included a socialist program in its revolutionary agenda in 1905. But Sun’s social revolution was at heart a political revolution, relying on the state to implement changes, whereas anarchists focused on cultural transformation and took the individual as its point of departure.

128 The disagreements between the Paris and Tokyo anarchists reflected to a certain extent different attitudes towards the modern West. As Dirlik claims, “The Paris anarchists were Francophiles who found much of value in the modern West but little to be proud of in China’s past. They valued science to the point of scientism, made industrialism into a utopia … and, with all their debunking of capitalism, were fascinated with the civilization that capitalism had created.” In Dirlik, “Vision and Revolution,” p. 153. I disagree with Dirlik here; the New Century anarchists were indeed fascinated with the fancy gadgets and scientific advances of modern, urban life but they were also aware of the strengths of China’s past.

129 In Xin shiji, No. 24, p. 4. See also Wilhelm Bauer. China and the Search for Happiness. New York: Seabury Press, 1976.

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innovation; novel technology would help reduce the time spent on labor, potentially enabling people of all classes to engage in intellectual and creative projects. In addition to its devotion to science, New Century anarchists promoted education and mutual aid as crucial components of their social revolutionary program.

Much of this thinking, as many scholars have noted, was influenced by Chinese anarchists’ interest in Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. New Century, having published an extraordinary 121 issues over the course of three years, was a critical source for the diffusion of translated radical literature. Notably, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, The Conquest of Bread, and Fields, Factories, and Workshops were first translated in New Century, then reprinted in other radical journals such as Tokyo-based Hengbao, providing inspiration for many of the Chinese communal experiments of the time.130 What has been oddly overlooked in most research on overseas Chinese anarchists is their engagement with the international anarchist community; in this case, especially with contemporary

French anarchists and anarchism in France – a surprising oversight given Li Shizeng’s associations with the family of Elisée Reclus, from whom he first learned about anarchism.131 Additionally, Paris anarchists’ attention to classical Chinese texts has been downplayed, likely due to their criticism of the Tokyo group’s “.” I would argue that the cosmopolitan environment and material conditions in France, as well as classical

130 See Dirlik, Arif. "The New Culture Movement Revisited: Anarchism and the Idea of Social Revolution in New Culture Thinking." Modern China Vol. 11. No. 3 (July 1985): 251-300.

131 Two notable exceptions are British historian Paul Bailey’s article "The Sino-French Connection: The Chinese Worker-Student Movement in France, 1902-1928" in China and the West: Ideas and Activists. Ed. Goodman, David S.G. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990, p. 72-102; and Peter Zarrow’s chapter “The Route to Anarchism Through Paris” in Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 59-81.

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traditions were crucial to the elaboration of the Paris anarchist group’s theory and practice. Like other contemporary radical ideologies, anarchism was very much shaped by (and helped to shape) linkages to both a classical Chinese heritage and the transnational context(s) in which the ideology developed.

Turn-of-the-century Paris provided Chinese anarchists access to an extremely vibrant and international community of radicals, liberals, anarchists, and socialists. The

Paris Commune of 1871 was a not-so-distant memory; there were frequent worker strikes and marches; and French intellectuals had been polarized recently by the Dreyfus Affair.

Although there is little evidence Chinese radicals took much interest in the affair, they were inspired by the role intellectuals played in French society, for, the Dreyfus Affair

“was the final proof that , freedom, and justice remain outside the established order and could be reached only through battle with the state.” 132 By the end of 1906, a moderately leftist government under Georges Clemenceau allowed socialism to grow in influence with few constraints compared to some of France’s European neighbors.

Radicals from the world over enjoyed relatively greater freedom of movement and freedom from persecution. Paris was also a major site of technological and scientific innovation. The hundred or so Chinese students in France in 1906 were amazed by the automobiles and gas-lit streets, the ubiquity of street cars and railroads, the newly constructed métro, as well as the occasional flying zeppelin. Several Chinese anarchists visited or stayed at the Aiglemont commune in Ardennes, befriending radicals from

132 See Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, p. 79.

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France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Germany, and Russia.133 Their anarchism was thus decidedly more cosmopolitan than their Tokyo counterparts; it embraced (at least the scientific advances of) modernity, and linked Chinese revolution to a world revolution.

The Paris anarchists, as most anarchists, rejected a political revolution “of the few” in favor of a broader social and cultural revolution that would benefit the many. They advocated a “revolution of all the people” (quantizhi geming 全體之革命) based on universal principles (gongli 公理) such as liberty (ziyou 自由), equality (pingdeng 平等), fraternity (boai 博愛), community (gongtong 共同), and justice and altruism (gongli yu liangxin 公理与良⼼ ).134 In short, for the anarchists, revolution was a process broadly identified with progress. Progress in turn signified realization of the universal ideals of the French Revolution combined with certain humanist aspects of Confucian ideology.

For the Chinese anarchists, progress meant “perfect benevolence, perfect kindness, perfect public-spiritedness, and perfect rectitude (zhiren, zhici, zhigong, zhizheng 至人，

至慈，至公，至正),”135 rather than an inevitable triumph of the strongest and fittest over “weaker” peoples. These moral were supported by six concrete activities: propaganda, mass associations, mass uprisings, popular resistance, assassination, and education. Of these, education was most closely identified with

133 Ibid.

134 In Xin shiji, no. 1. 22 June 1907.

135 In Zarrow, Peter. Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, p. 115.

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anarchist philosophy.136 In fact, education and revolution were equivalent in the minds of the anarchists; one was seen as necessary for the fulfillment of the other:

Revolution will be effective only if, with the spread of education, people get rid of their old customs, and achieve a new life. From the perspective of effectiveness, this means that if there is education for revolution before the revolution is undertaken, there will be nothing impossible about education. Therefore, anarchist revolution … is nothing but education.137

Anarchist education (wuzhengfude) that promoted civic virtue and autonomy was contrasted with government education (youzhengfude), seen as inculcating militarism, self-interest, and obedience to authority. As Wu Zhihui wrote:

“What is selfish learning? It is learning for [the purpose of] making a living, supporting a family, enriching the country and strengthening the race. It is learning for becoming an official and getting rich. It is learning for becoming famous and raising the standard of one’s family…What is public learning? It is learning for the improvement of society. It is learning for the evolution of the world.”138

Paradoxically, anarchist education was at once anti-political and intimately linked to

136 There was a tension between violence and anarchism’s larger ethical goals that education helped to resolve. As Dirlik put it, “Violence could achieve destruction, but construction required education, which was the ultimate justification even for revolutionary violence.”136 If anarchists could effect a sixiang geming (thought revolution) in the masses, then the revolution could be realized from the bottom up, rather than top down (as the nationalists, and later, Marxists would favor), and violence potentially reduced or avoided. See Dirlik, Arif. "Vision and Revolution: Anarchism in Chinese Revolutionary Thought on the Eve of the 1911 Revolution." Modern China 12. No. 2 (April 1986): 123-65, p. 135.

137 Xin Shiji, No. 65, p.11. Cited in Dirlik, “New Culture Revisited,” p. 136.

138 “Qianye zashuo” (Random comments to occupy a thousand nights), Xin Shiji, no. 21 (9 Sept. 1907), p. 82-83. A similar division was perceived between study in the U.S. and study in France. As an article by Wang Guangqi (1892-136) in Lü-ou zhoukan (Weekly Journal for Overseas Students in Europe) asserted, there were “two strands of overseas study.” The American strand promoted the worship of money (baijin zhuyi) while the French program promoted diligent work and laborism (laodong zhuyi). See “Liuxue liang da chaoliu” (Two Important Strands in Overseas Study) in Lü-ou zhoukan, No. 58, December 18, 1920. Reprinted in Zhang Yunhou et al. eds, Liufa qingong jianxue yundong (The Work-Study Movement in France). Shanghai: 1986, p. 662-65.

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politics. In some ways, this was an extension, rather than a repudiation of Confucian ideology, which placed education at the center – as the main criterion – for participation in politics. The empire had long determined what was acceptable as appropriate knowledge in the service of the state. Given China’s tremendous dislocation in the new global context, the state and the ideological apparatuses underpinning it had to be radically rethought. The anarchists were among the first to advocate the universalization of education (jiaoyu puji 教育普及), and to insist on the education of the “whole person”

(quanren 全⼈) rather than on just the development of the intellect as key to human progress.139 Anarchist education aimed to sweep away all classes in society by ending the division between rich and poor, between those with status and those without.140 In this regard, their thinking was indistinguishable from elements of New Culture thinking in general. For example, Cai Yuanpei, President of (Beida), summarized his as promoting “civic morality”141:

“What is civic morality (gongmin daode 公民道德)? It is the French Revolution – its slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity. The essence of morality is here. Confucius said, “… you cannot deprive the humblest peasant of his opinion.” said, “A great man … is one whom riches and honors cannot taint, poverty and lowly station cannot shift, majesty and power cannot bend.” This is a definition

139 Chan, Ming K. and Dirlik, Arif. Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927-1932. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991.

140 This is a very different, much broader idea of “class” than what Marx had in mind. I would say it signifies all types of social categories (racial, ethnic, national, , etc.), including but not limited to socioeconomic class.

141 Cai Yuanpei is today widely regarded as a great liberal and humanist, but his philosophy owed much to anarchism. After his forced resignation as President of Beida in the late 1920s, he joined the Paris anarchists Wu Zhihui, Li Shizeng, and Zhang Jingjian as the “Four Elder Statesmen” of the Guomindang.

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of liberty, and so this is what the ancients called righteousness or justice (yi 義).”142

Drawing parallels between the French Revolution and Confucian morality, Cai goes on to match equality with the classical notion of “reciprocity” (shu). For Cai, as for the anarchists, liberty and equality were intertwined: “the two are opposites but are truly reached together.”143 Cai saw the reconciliation of liberty and equality as achievable through an educational curriculum that emphasized civic virtue and internationalism rather than private gain and national interests; that would benefit society rather than politicians and warlords. In this respect, he was a faithful supporter of Li Shizeng’s anarchist educational ventures in Paris, Lyon, and Shanghai.144

Co-founder and organizer of several anarchist enterprises in France, including the

World Society, a bean curd factory, the Chinese Labor Corps, a number of Sino-French educational associations, the Work-Study Movement, and co-editor of New Century, Li

Shizeng (1881-1973) was a dynamic force in the development of Chinese anarchism, and a spirited intermediary between China and France in the early twentieth century.

Educated in Confucian classics as well as Western science, Li was the son of an elite

Qing official and one-time tutor to the Tongzhi emperor. He first traveled to France as an embassy student ( xuesheng) under the auspices of , the Chinese

142 Cai Yuanpei xiansheng quanji, p. 453-454, originally published in Jiaoyu zazhi, 12 February 1912. Cited in Peter Zarrow. Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, p. 205.

143 Ibid.

144 In addition to the Diligent Work-Frugal Study program, Li helped to establish the more elite Institut Franco-Chinois in Lyon (1921-1951), and the Guoli laodong daxue (National Labor University) in Shanghai (1927-1932).

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minister to France (and a family neighbor) in 1902.145 Accompanied by two other embassy students, Zhang Jingqiang (1887-1950) and Chen Lu (1876-1939), Li enrolled in the École Pratique d’Agriculture in the town of Montargis, just south of Paris, and later studied biology and chemistry at the Institut de Pasteur in Paris, where he met Paul

Reclus, nephew of the famous anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus (1830-1905).146

Through the Reclus family, he was introduced to the works of Proudhon and Kropotkin, to leading French anarchists such as Jean Grave (1854-1939), editor of Les Temps nouveaux, whose address Li borrowed to publish New Century,147 as well as to prominent

French intellectuals such as Paul Painlevé and Edouard Herriott.

In 1906, Li founded the Shijie she (World Society) to promote anarchism and science. With Europe’s only Chinese printing press, the Shijie she published its first journal, a pictorial called The World (Shijie), which featured of famous scientists and thinkers, including Darwin and Elisée Reclus. These activities were funded by Zhang Jiangqiang, fellow embassy student, and heir to a silk fortune. Zhang had

145 The custom of sending students abroad with embassy missions began in the 1890s, when the Qing requested that the ministers to England, France, Germany and the United States take three students with them to study foreign languages. See Hayhoe, Ruth. "A Comparative Approach to the Cultural Dynamics of Sino-Western Educational Co-Operation." The China Quarterly No. 104 (Dec. 1985): 676-99 and Bailey, Paul. "The Sino-French Connection: The Chinese Worker-Student Movement in France, 1902- 1928." China and the West: Ideas and Activists. Ed. Goodman, David S.G. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990. 72-102.

146 See the recollections of Shao Kelu (Jacque Reclus, the son of Paul Reclus), “Wo suorenshi de Li Shizeng xiansheng” (The Li Shizeng I knew) in Zhuanji wenxue (Biographical Literature), 45:3 (1984) p. 87-8, as well as Li Shizeng xiansheng jinianji (Taibei, 1974), p. 236. Li later invited Paul Reclus to teach in China. Jacque Reclus would travel to China to teach at the short-lived joint anarchist-GMD National Labor University (Guoli laodong daxue) in Shanghai, and live in China for twenty-five years (1927-1952).

147 New Century’s Esperanto subtitle, La Novaj Tempoj was a tribute to Les Temps nouveaux. Zarrow suggests that although Graves knew the Chinese anarchists and may have indirectly influenced them, it was Grave’s friendship with and interpretations of Kropotkin that had a larger impact on the Paris anarchists. See Zarrow, Peter. Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, p. 80-81. See also Graves’ , Quarante ans de propagande anarchiste. Paris: Flammarion: 1973.

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earlier established a successful trading company in Paris for the import of Chinese silk, tea, antiques, and chinoiserie. Li and Zhang were soon joined by Wu Zhihui (1864-1953), who became the dominant intellectual voice of the weekly journal the three friends founded on June 22, 1907, Xin Shiji (New Century). Unlike Li and Zhang, Wu came from a poor family in Jiangsu province. An excellent student, he passed the competitive examination (a provincial level civil service exam), and became an accomplished linguist, philosopher, and labor organizer. Wu is as well known for helping to standardize

Chinese pronunciation as for his journalism in radical publications. An important fourth member was (1884-1946), a major contributor to the journal, whose role in the collaborationist government during the Second World War would lead to his execution in 1946.

New Century, with 121 issues published between June 1907 and May 1910, was the longest-running revolutionary journal in Chinese history, and became one of the leading voices of Chinese radicalism at the time.148 Geared principally toward Chinese students in Europe and Japan, it was also sized to be smuggled back to China in the bedding of Chinese merchant seamen. Li, Zhang, Wu, and Chu were all members of Sun

Zhongsan’s Tongmenghui, and promoted anti-Manchu revolution through their articles.

In addition to attacks against the Qing government, New Century criticized traditional

Chinese culture and social structures, calling for wide-scale reforms such as the abolition

148 Although the government in Beijing tried numerous times to have New Century shut down, and the French police kept dossiers on Chinese radicals, revolutionaries in France enjoyed greater freedom from persecution than their counterparts elsewhere. Natural Justice, for example, was suppressed by the Japanese government after several failed rebellions in 1908 led to a crackdown against Chinese radicals in Japan. Liu Shipei had to go underground while New Century was able to keep publishing. The journal stopped publishing after Zhang pulled his funding to pursue other projects. Zhang would later become a major financial backer of Jiang Jieshi’s Guomindang.

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of the family and of .149 The journal also wrote articles introducing readers to radical thought, and translated European anarchist texts. Among these was Li’s translation of Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid (huzhu lun 互助輪), and Elisée Reclus’ six-volume L’Homme et la terre (Ren yü di 人與地), which had been published posthumously between 1905 and 1908. There were many resonances between the thought of Reclus and that of Li. Most notably, Reclus’ emphasis on science and education, and his belief in a gradual, evolutionary process in the creation of a new society helped to inform Li’s ideas for worker education and work-study, which Li saw as essential to abolishing the distinction between intellectual and worker, and creating an egalitarian society based on “mutual aid” (huzhu 互助) and “cooperation” (hezuo 合作).150 As his colleague Wu Zhihui remarked: “Far-sighted men regard the fact that higher education is not yet universal as the reason why classes are born. They grieve about this and [think that] the way of remedying the situation is to make education equal [for all].”151 Like many radicals of the time, Li hoped to uproot hierarchical and authoritarian Confucian values; his unique contribution to that task was to unite labor with learning.

It was in the context of educating migrant workers at a Chinese bean curd factory that Li first began to promote the idea of “qingong jianxue” (diligent work and frugal study). Like Reclus and many of his anarchist colleagues, Li was a strict vegetarian, and

149 See Xin shiji, no. 60 (1908) and no. 82 (1909).

150 In Paul Bailey. "The Sino-French Connection: The Chinese Worker-Student Movement in France, 1902-1928." China and the West: Ideas and Activists, p. 74-75.

151 Cited in Dirlik, Arif. "The New Culture Movement Revisited: Anarchism and the Idea of Social Revolution in New Culture Thinking." Modern China Vol. 11. No. 3 (July 1985): 251-300, p. 266.

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believed that there existed a market for tofu in France.152 While in Paris, in addition to his political activities, he conducted research on the chemistry of the soybean, co-authored a book in French on the subject, helped to popularize “le fromage chinois,” and founded a bean curd factory (the Usine Caseo-Sojaine) in Colombes.153 The factory opened its doors in 1908 with 30 workers recruited from his native village in Zhili. Li then established a school near the factory that offered the workers Chinese, French, and general science courses, and invited Wu Zhihui and Cai Yuanpei to teach there.154 No , drinking, or gambling was permitted, and the workers were expected to devote their spare time to study. For Li, qingong jianxue, as Bailey writes, “would have both a moral and educational function, transforming Chinese workers into knowledgeable, self- reliant and public-minded citizens shorn of their superstitions and backward customs.”155

Li, an ardent Francophile, believed that France was the ideal environment for promoting such a transformation because of its model of secular education, the prestige

152 It is not clear whether Li was vegetarian before or after he became an anarchist, but according to the precepts of the anarchist Society to Advance Morality (Jindehui), vegetarianism belongs to the highest stage of morality. Founded in Beijing in January 1912 by Wu Zhihui, Li Shizeng, Zhang Ji and , the Society aimed to promote anarchist moral principles among its members in hopes of eventually creating an ideal society. The basic tenets included bans on drinking, gambling, and concubinage, but there were also categories of advanced morality: Class A members were to refrain from holding government office; Class B members pledged to all of the above, and to not smoke or join parliament; Class C individuals added temperance and vegetarianism to the list. In Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, p. 190-191.

153 Li’s text Le Soja, sa culture, ses usages alimentaires, thérapeutiques, agricoles, et industrielles was distributed at the 1910 Universal Exhibition in Brussels, where the Chinese exhibit featured the many uses of bean curd.

154 Cai Yuanpei, who was studying philosophy at the University of Leipzig in 1907, was an occasional visitor to New Century’s offices at 25 rue Dareau, as was Sun Zhongshan, who would stop by on one of his fundraising trips around the world.

155 "The Sino-French Connection: The Chinese Worker-Student Movement in France, 1902-1928." China and the West: Ideas and Activists, p. 78.

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of French advances in science and philosophy156, the structure of its university system

(daxue zhidu)157, and its progressive and republican ideals.158 With the overthrow of the

Qing, and the establishment of the Chinese republic, Li saw the perfect opportunity to advance republican ideals through education. In 1912, with Wu Zhihui and Cai Yuanpei, recently appointed Minister of Education, Li founded the Liufa Jianxue Hui (Society for

Frugal Study in France) to “cut down on expenditures in order to expand overseas study, and by labor and a simple life to cultivate habits of diligence and hard work.”159 The study society, funded entirely by the founders, organized a preparatory school in Beijing that offered courses in French, Chinese, math, and hygiene. The first group of 160 students departed for France between 1912 and 1913, and enrolled in schools in

Montargis, Paris, and Fontainebleau. While in France, the students were expected to eat and dress simply, perform chores including cleaning, cooking, and mending clothes, and avoid vices such as smoking, drinking, and visiting prostitutes. The program aimed to

156 Even after the Work-Study program collapsed in 1922 due to political conflicts and lack of financing, Li never faltered in his belief that France, with its revolutionary ideals and higher education system provided the ideal environment for cultivating a new, public-minded Chinese citizen. In a 1922 article in New Education (Xin Jiaoyu), Li pointed to the scientific accomplishments of Descartes, Lamarck, Lavoisier, and Pasteur, and referred to Robespierre, Voltaire, , Diderot, Fourier, Proudhon and Reclus as the pioneers of humanist (rendao) philosophy. See “Faguo jiaoyu yu wo guo jiaoyu qiantu zhu guanxi” (The relationship between French education and China’s educational future) in Li Shizeng xiansheng wenji, vol. 1, p. 231-236.

157 Li admired the efficiency of France’s higher education system, which was comprised of sixteen education districts (académies), with the university of each district also administering primary and secondary schools, allowing students to easily transfer and advance from school to school. This may have influenced Li’s organization of preparatory schools in China for study in France.

158 Like Cai Yuanpei, Li compared the French republican ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the Confucian notions of ren, yi, and shu. Li believed these ideals to be at the core of the French education system.

159 Liufa qingong juanxue yundong (The Work Study Movement in France), vol. I, p. 15.

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send 3000 Chinese students to French cities over the course of 5 years, regardless of background or financial need. As Wang Jinwei noted, “others than the rich or influential could go abroad and a more positive contribution would be made to the raising of the educational level of the population as a whole.”160 But these plans were interrupted by

President Yuan Shikai’s suspicion of the subversive effects of study in France and his closure of the preparatory schools, and more significantly, by the outbreak of world war.

Anarchism in a New Era of Nationalism and International Diplomacy:

The Chinese Labor Corps and the Expansion of Diligent Work-Frugal Study

During the Great War, China seized the opportunity to improve its semi-colonial status by sending workers to France to help offset labor shortages in the allied war effort.

It also officially declared war on Germany in 1917.161 These two activities won China the right to attend the Versailles Peace Conference two years later. A new international order was imminent, and the young Chinese Republic was determined to ensure an equal place for itself among the world’s nation-states. After a number of failed attempts to join the war between 1914 and 1915, Liang Shiyi (1869-1933), acting Minister of Finance, proposed the yigong daibing (literally, laborers in place of soldiers) plan, and began

160 See Liufa jianxue baogaoshu (A Report on Frugal Study in France). : China, 1918, p. 67-71. In Bailey, Paul. "The Chinese Work-Study Movement in France." The China Quarterly.No. 115 (Sep. 1988): p. 446.

161 In the few existing studies on the Chinese laborers in World War I, the initiative is usually attributed to British and French negotiations. However, as Xu Guoqi argues, contrary to the popular belief that China was pulled into the war by external forces, China elected to join the allied war effort as a deliberate act of diplomacy. See Xu, Guoqi. China and the Great War: China's Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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discussions to implement the program with Allied diplomats in 1915. Recruitment of

Chinese laborers began in 1916, and was overseen by the private Huimin Company, as well as by the anarchist Qinggong Jianxue hui (Society for Diligent Work and Frugal

Study) founded in 1915, and the Société franco-chinoise d’éducation (Huafa Jiaoyu

Hui).162 The first group of approximately 1,700 Chinese workers (Hua gong) arrived in

France in August 1916. The Chinese laborers worked alongside workers from French colonies in North Africa and Indochina, and were organized under the supervision of the

Colonial Labor Service (Service d’organisation des travailleurs coloniaux) – violating

China’s claim to national sovereignty, and belying France’s official insistence on the cultural affinities between the two civilizations, and its non-imperialist aims in China.

Between 1916 and 1918, roughly 140,000 Chinese workers under French and British command were sent to France to aid in a wide range of undesirable and dangerous activities, such as digging trenches, manufacturing and cleaning ammunitions, rescuing wounded soldiers during combat, and excavating dead bodies from battle sites.163 Most of the laborers came from poor, rural areas in Shandong, Fujian, and Zhejiang provinces.

There were also a small number of students, unemployed minor officials and soldiers, and impoverished xiucai (traditional lower-degree holders).164 Although roughly 5,000

162 Founded in 1916, the Société franco-chinoise was jointly overseen by Li Shizeng, Cai Yuanpei, Wang Jingwei, Alphonse Aulard, Marius Montet, and Edouard Herriott. It was organized into three sections: one responsible for overseeing the translation of French and Chinese works; a second for establishing scholarly exchanges; and a third for organizing Chinese workers in France. See Hayhoe, "A Comparative Approach to the Cultural Dynamics of Sino-Western Educational Co-Operation" (Dec. 1985).

163 The numbers remain contested, ranging between 100,000 and over 300,000. For an overview of the numbers issue, see Xu Guoqi. China and the Great War, p. 126-130.

164 In Paul Bailey, "The Sino-French Connection: The Chinese Worker-Student Movement in France, 1902-1928," p. 82.

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Chinese workers died during the war, including 700 en route to France from German submarine attacks165, and it is believed that the Chinese Labor Corps effort was crucial to the Allied victory, China’s expectation of the return of Shandong was betrayed by prior secret negotiations between Japan and Yuan Shikai’s government, as well as between

Japan and the Allies. The Versailles treaty accorded Shandong to Japan, sparking mass protests in China and abroad, and leading directly to the May Fourth Movement.166

Despite the great disappointment, Chinese attendance at an international peace conference symbolized “for the first time in the modern era, the Western powers’ recognition of China’s membership in the international community [after] a century of repeated humiliations.”167 It also set the groundwork for the 1921 Sino-German treaty, the first equal treaty signed with a major power after the Opium War, and China was

165 Although the Chinese Labor Corps were sent to France as workers rather than as soldiers, they usually worked in or near battlefields, and many died on site. There are also records of death due to German bombardments, as well as at least one instance in which workers had to fight Germans with picks and shovels in close combat when emergencies arose. See Xu Guoqi. China and the Great War, p. 143-145.

166 The climax of Chinese indignation and fury occurred on May 4, 1919, when over three thousand students from three Beijing universities gathered at Tiananmen Square to protest the unjust treaty. The student protests were followed by worker strikes, boycotts against Japanese products, and wide-ranging literary responses. Described in various historiographies as a “crisis of consciousness,” the “Chinese Enlightenment,” and the origins of the “new democratic revolution,” the May Fourth movement captured a widespread sense of disillusionment and political apprehension, patriotic outrage at China’s semi-colonial status, and desire for totalistic reform on social, cultural, economic and political levels. Fusing with the momentum of the predominantly literary New Culture movement, May Fourth was at once a politically motivated , a merchant and worker’s movement, an economic boycott against Japan, an intellectual “New Thought Tide” advocating Western science and democracy, and a revolutionary literary movement that created a new vernacular literature. See Chow Tse-Tsung’s classic study The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1960). See also Lin, Yusheng. Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era. University of Wisconsin Press, 1978; and Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. In Chinese communist historiography, May Fourth is portrayed as marking the start of the era that brought the CCP to power.

167 Bailey, Paul. "The Sino-French Connection and World War One," p. 2.

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eventually able to recover Shandong at the Washington Conference in 1922.

Consequently, despite China’s naïveté in believing the Allied powers would follow their own principles of open diplomacy, justice and national sovereignty, it managed to use the

Great War "as a springboard for national renewal, for carving out a new national identity

… and for sorting out a more equitable basis for interacting with other nations."168

Although we cannot treat the Chinese Labor Corps, and the captivating personal stories of the worker-soldiers in detail here, suffice it to say that it was an unprecedented historical moment in which hundreds of thousands of mostly illiterate workers traveled halfway around the world to support in wartime, nations, that had (and for the most part still) treated them as an inferior race. This was a defining moment in Chinese national identity: for the first time, a sizable number of non-elite Chinese “saw with their own eyes what a Western country looked like, and how people in other countries worked and lived.”169 More importantly, they experienced how other peoples perceived them, and gained a visceral consciousness of what it meant to be Chinese in the world. One laborer,

Fu Xingsan 傅省三, argued perceptively in an essay published in The Chinese Laborers’

Weekly that prior to their sojourn in France, Chinese laborers did not understand the relationship between individuals and families, or between families and nations.

Witnessing foreigners sacrifice their lives in defense of their nation, and seeing China being denied its right to speak at the Peace Conference while Japan was elevated as a

168 Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War, p. 281.

169 Ibid., p. 152.

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great nation, aroused immense patriotism and nationalism in the laborers.170 The same journal frequently published records of workers’ donations from their earnings abroad to national causes such as flood relief, the National Salvation Fund, and the Patriot Fund.

Most of the workers returned to China after the war, and were active in mass protests and the organization of labor unions during the May Fourth period. Roughly 3,000 workers remained and eventually settled in France, finding employment as industrial workers.171

Most significant for our purposes is the link between the Chinese Labor Corps and worker education initiatives established by elite Chinese overseas. During the war, Li

Shizeng continued his anarchist activities, founding a Chinese workers’ school in Paris to train interpreters, and establishing as mentioned, a number of Sino-French work-study associations through his French and Chinese contacts. Through the Société Franco- chinoise d’éducation, Li published two workers’ journals, The Chinese Labor Journal

(Huagong zazhi) and The Magazine of Chinese in Europe (Lüou zazhi). Another important education program for the laborers was organized by the Chinese YMCA, which offered education, entertainment, letter-writing services, religious instruction, and classes on national , civil rights and modern government.172 It was also an

170 Fu Xingsan, “The Pros and Cons of Chinese Laborers’ Being in France,” (Huagong zai Fa yu zhouguo de sunyi) in The Chinese Labor Workers’ Weekly, (Jidujiao qingnianhui zhufa huagong zhoubao) no. 7 (March 12, 1919). In Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War, p. 153. A full translation and close reading of the essay, possibly the only extant piece of writing produced by a Chinese Labor Corps participant, is provided by Yurou Zhong in Chapter One of her dissertation, Script Crisis and Literary Modernity in China, 1916-1958 (Columbia University, 2014).

171 In Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War, p. 146. The fact that most Chinese laborers in France worked in factories is unusual; most overseas Chinese worked on railroads, plantations, in mines, or aspired to enter commerce. As Benton writes, “Only in France did a majority join the industrial in the interwar years.” See Chinese Migrants and Internationalism, p. 65.

172 Ibid., p. 150.

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important site of worker and intellectual exchange – elite Chinese educated abroad such as Yale graduate Yan Yangchu (James Yen) wrote letters for the workers to their families in China, read and translated foreign newspapers, and offered basic literacy classes. In fact, Yan established the first mass anti-illiteracy program in modern Chinese history, creating a basic 1,000-word primer.173 The effectiveness of the program may be seen in

Fu Xingsan’s aforementioned essay on the benefits of the Chinese laborers’ presence in

France, which was submitted to a writing contest in The Chinese Laborer’s Weekly, a

YMCA publication edited by Yan.174

Preparatory schools for sending students to France that were closed in 1913 by

Yuan Shikai were reopened, and in early 1919, the Society for Diligent Work and Frugal

Study (Liu Fa qinggong jiangxuehui) sent its first group of students and workers to

France. Between March 1919 and December 1920, roughly 1600 students departed for

France, mostly from Hunan and provinces. They ranged in age from 16 (Deng

Xiaoping) to 42 (Xu Teli175), though most were in their early twenties. According to one set of figures, of the approximately 500 students placed in factories, the majority were concentrated in iron and steel plants in Firminy and Saint-Chamond, and the Schneider armaments plants at Harfleur and Le Creusot; and of the 579 students placed in schools, most were in secondary schools in the Paris vicinity, while a few enrolled in lycées and

173 In Zhong. Script Crisis and Literary Modernity in China, 2014.

174 Ibid.

175 Xu would go on to become the commissar of education at Yan’an in 1937.

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vocational schools.176

At the same time that Chinese educators like Li Shizeng and Cai Yuanpei were advocating study in France and study of the in China, French politicians were eager to exert French cultural influence in China. By the mid-1910s, the economic and cultural power of Britain and the U.S. was a major concern, with numerous French publications expressing alarm that Anglo-Saxon culture was overtaking French influence in China.177 As Paul Painlevé remarked:

France should not be lacking at a time when China, in the process of modernizing, is looking for intellectual guides and technical advisers. If we abandon the promotion of French culture in China today, German culture will benefit tomorrow at our expense. French civilization is the one best able to harmonise with ancient civilisations and allow them to develop unhindered. The peace of the world has nothing to gain from an Americanized or Anglicised China, guided solely in industrial and commercial methods.178

Three things should be noted about this statement: the threat of German, American and

British competition; the cultural harmony of France and China; and France’s benevolence in wanting to ensure world peace. This rhetoric of cultural affinity and benevolence belies

French anxiety over its waning global cultural and economic influence. Coincidentally,

French anxieties dovetailed with Chinese cultural and political crisis. Both China and

France were deeply concerned with their positions in the world, and leveraged a diplomatic relationship with each other to advance self-strengthening objectives.

176 See G. Barman and N. Duliost, Étudiants-Ouvriers chinois en France, 1920-1940 (Paris, 1981).

177 See Asie Française, no. 127, 1911, no. 159, June 1914; Politique de Pékin, 21 April 1918.

178 Cited in Paul Bailey, “The Sino-French Connection” in China and the West, p. 96.

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Ultimately, the nationalist interests underpinning the Diligent Work-Frugal Study program, as well as the program’s noble goal of creating a more just society by abolishing the gap between mental and manual labor were undermined by post-war recession, conflicts between the students and the program’s administrators, and increasing disillusionment with work-study as a means of national salvation. Some students, rather than being imbued with the spirit of labor, found factory routine stultifying, and their fellow workers, both French and Chinese to be idle, pleasure- seeking, and disorderly. Chen Yi, a future foreign minister, insisted that factory life had nothing to do with the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but revealed the evil nature of European capitalism.179 At this time, principally under the influence of Cai Hesen’s Marxist study group at Montargis, many students began to turn to Marxism. As funding dried up, and the recession forced more factories to lay off workers, students began to protest and demanded financial assistance from the Chinese government. Events came to a head when the students learned of a new university to be opened in Lyon, the Institut Franco-Chinois, in 1921. They assumed they would be allowed to study at the new institution, but it was soon apparent that enrollment would be based on competitive examinations, and students were also expected to have a certain level of income, and knowledge of French. The impoverished students accused Li

Shizeng and Cai Yuanpei of abandoning them, and over 100 demonstrators converged on

Lyon to protest the new institute’s opening. The protestors, including future CCP leaders

Cai Hesen, Li Lisan, and Chen Yi were arrested and deported, marking the definitive end

179 Fufa qingong jianxue yundong shiliao (Historical Materials), Vol. 2: p. 212-38, 291-92.

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of the program. Those who remained, such as Zhou Enlai, Wang Ruofei and Zhao Shiyan would go on to found the Chinese Communist Youth League in the Bois de Boulogne in

1922.

Conclusion: The of Anarchism and Work-Study

Ironically, the intentions of Li and his peers to create a Sino-French work-study program open to the masses resulted in the creation of an elitist institution for a select few. And the work-study participants France hoped would sing its praises back in China would become some of the most vocal critics of French imperialist interests.

Nevertheless, it was not the end of the anarchist dream to “turn schools into fields and factories, and fields and factories into schools” (xuexiao nongchang gongchanghua, nongchang gongchan xuexiaohua).180 Although Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Zhang Jingjiang, and Cai Yuanpei all became loyal members of the Guomindang, partly out of hostility to the Communists, and partly due to longstanding personal ties dating to their alliance with

Sun Zhongshan, they continued to promote anarchism from within the GMD. In

September 1927, they helped to found the National Labor University (Guoli laodong daxue) in Shanghai to “train a new kind of labor leader, and a new kind of intellectual.”181 Doomed from the start due to its reliance on the political authority of the

GMD, the Labor University represented anarchism’s last attempt to translate a

180 Bi Bo (Bi Xiushao), “Laodong daxuede mudi yu shiming” (The goals and mission of Labor University), Geming, 9 (August 1927): 264-68. Cited in Chan, Ming K. and Dirlik, Arif. Schools into Fields and Factories, p. 1.

181 Ibid. p. 57.

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revolutionary theory of labor and learning into practice. While the anarchist ideas of qingong jianxue (work-study), and dao minjian (“go to the people”) would emerge time and again in Chinese history, labor learning was disassociated from the original anarchist goal of a stateless, , and rendered into an instrument of state politics.

Notoriously, during the Cultural Revolution, labor learning in the form of the reeducation campaign, although initially utopian, was instrumentalized in later stages in the service of state power.

Among anarchism’s most significant achievements as a mode of translation, it “not only brought labor into the consciousness of Chinese intellectuals, but brought labor and intellectuals together in the spaces they created.”182 In French factories, schools, and combat zones, politicized intellectuals and laborers collaboratively contributed to a revolutionary discourse that was constantly evolving, from anti-Manchu revolution to cultural and social revolution, to a fervent anti-imperialist nationalism, to a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

In the mid 1930s, after escaping the GMD’s brutal persecution of Communists in

Shanghai and other urban centers, and following years of protracted guerilla warfare, and the yearlong across China, Mao and the CCP settled in Yan’an to consolidate the party’s peasant base and rebuild the revolutionary movement. It was in

Yan’an, in the context of civil war and war with Japan, that Mao began to elaborate a set of revolutionary practices and theories that became known as Mao Zedong Thought. At the same time, war broke out in Spain between Franco’s Nationalists and the left-leaning

182 Ibid. p. 295.

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Republican government, attracting worldwide attention and aid. While Madrid became a political mecca for radical exiles, refugees, and workers from all over the world who joined the fight against , Yan’an was the political destination of most Chinese revolutionaries who might otherwise have enlisted in Spain.183 As Mao told the Spanish in 1937, “many Chinese Red Army fighters want to go to Spain to join your struggle” but could not do so because of China’s war with Japan.184 Yet, according to a new study by

Chinese-American scientists, Nancy Tsou and Len Tsou, several dozen Chinese went to

Spain; some as part of the International Brigades, others as part of Spanish squadrons.185

The majority of Chinese soldiers in Spain came from France, and were members of the

ECCO, and/or the PCF. Many of them had been participants in the Chinese Labor Corps of World War I, the Diligent Work-Frugal Study program, or both. Zhang Ruishi (1893-

1968) and Liu Jingtian (1890 - ?), for example, were both soldier-laborers who had stayed in France after the Great War, where they found factory jobs at the car manufacturer Renault, and became members of the PCF. With roughly 100 of their

French peers, they joined the “Renault Company” recruited to fight in Spain. Both Zhang and Liu were over 40, and knew they could not expect their jobs back if they returned to

France. They were in fact arrested and briefly imprisoned upon their return in 1939, but were freed through the intervention of French colleagues, who also helped raise their return fares to China. They reached Yan’an in November 1939, where they were admitted

183 Benton, Chinese Migrants and Internationalism, 2007.

184 Ibid, p. 67.

185 Ni Huirui and Zou Ningyuan. Dang shi jie nian qing de shihou: Can jia Xibanya nei zhan de Zhongguo ren, 1936-1939 (The Call of Spain: the Chinese Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939). Guilin: Guangxi shi fan da xue chu ban she, 2013. 85

into the CCP.186 Remarkably, these two men from rural China, after participating in two wars on European soil, joining a non-Chinese communist party, and working in a French factory, found their way back to China to join Mao’s revolution.

186 Ibid. 86

CHAPTER TWO:

La Chinoise I: Translating Feminisms

Contemporary discourses about women’s rights tend to situate an enlightened, humanitarian West against the repressive traditional practices of the non-West (killing of infant girls in China, immolation of young brides in India, female genital mutilation in parts of Africa, etc.). Often these discourses are used to villainize non-Western governments, and legitimize political marginalization, coercion, and in some cases, war.

Even while pressing for ending violence against women, and granting women equal access to education, elections, and political office among other rights, such discourses reinforce an essential hierarchy in which the West is seen as superior to the rest. This superiority then justifies the use of Euro-American financial, political and military forces to effect not just positive changes in other regions, but also to coerce and exploit those regions to benefit Western economic and political interests (sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally).

The reverse scenario occurred during the , when Western liberals disillusioned with both Euro- and Soviet turned to

China as a socialist utopia. French feminists Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, for example, toured China mid century, and praised its socialist commitment to women’s rights. They have subsequently been criticized for their Orientalism and facile acceptance of Potemkin village-style tours. These cases are not very interesting in themselves; the analytical tendency to set the “East” in binary opposition to the “West”, whether as an example to be derided or a model to be lauded for distinct political purposes marks

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centuries of encounter between China and the West, and has been much commented on.

Rather, this chapter is interested in how this logic gets naturalized, what it masks, and what an alternative to such binary thinking might look like.

The dominant logic seems to assume that women’s rights and feminism are

Western concepts. By attending to the particularities of the China/France feminist lens at specific historical junctures, and how ontological categories such as East/West, male/female, man/woman are constituted and translated, this chapter will also challenge the assumption that feminism is a European import, filtering into non-Western lands by way of Euro-American theory. Most scholars of Chinese feminism, for example, trace its conception to early twentieth-century Chinese translations of European thinkers such as

John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and . Such translated texts concerning “natural rights” inspired male liberal reformers like Liang Qichao and Jin

Tianhe to advocate for women’s education and rights as a way of strengthening the

Chinese nation against Western imperialism.

Until recently, Chinese feminism was thus seen as a derivative of nationalism and socialism. However, as Lydia Liu, Rebecca Karl and Dorothy Ko assert in The Birth of

Chinese Feminism (2013), the work of He-Yin Zhen, a female theorist considered to be one of the founders of Chinese feminism, suggests otherwise. Liu, Karl and Ko’s reconstruction of her essays makes available for the first time in English a radical transnational understanding of gender, labor, and power at the moment of China’s semi- colonization and imminent dynastic overthrow. By bringing He-Yin Zhen into conversation with Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, I do not want to imply that He-

Yin has a more authentic or accurate perspective of Chinese culture or women because

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she is a “native.” Instead, I will show that Beauvoir and Kristeva were limited by their categories of analysis, and the particular genre of the travel narrative, whereas He-Yin

Zhen’s analytical categories proved productive because of her particular engagement with through the lens of anarchism, a philosophy inclined towards dissolving binary categories rather than enforcing them. Instead of focusing solely on Kristeva and

Beauvoir’s Orientalism, I hope to answer: How else could they have written about

Chinese women? Was/Is Orientalism inevitable in translating the “other”? What other possibilities can be envisioned?

Before addressing these questions, let us examine the context and nature of

Beauvoir and Kristeva’s visits to China and their writings on Chinese women.

Passage to China/the China Impasse: French Feminist Myths of China

In 1955, Simone de Beauvoir was one of the first Western intellectuals to visit the

People’s Republic of China upon the personal invitation of Zhou Enlai. Beauvoir and her lifelong companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, were among 1500 foreigners sponsored by the

Chinese government to tour and observe China during its transition to socialism.187

Approximately twenty years later, another European intellectual, Julia Kristeva, traveled to Beijing with the Parisian literary journal, Tel Quel. In the spring of 1974, the Tel Quel group, which included Kristeva, her husband, Philippe Sollers, , Marcelin

Pleynet and François Wahl (Lacan was scheduled to attend but canceled at the last

187 1955 corresponds to the middle years of the First Five Year Plan (1953-1957), a period characterized by efforts to achieve industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and political centralization based largely on the Soviet development model. The 1500 figure comes from Beauvoir’s La Longue marche. 89

moment), was one of the first Western delegations received by President Mao after China joined the in 1971. Both trips culminated in the publication of texts, which may be best referred to as travel narratives: Beauvoir’s La longue marche: essai sur la Chine was originally published by Gallimard in 1957, and Kristeva’s Des

Chinoises was published by Éditions des Femmes in 1974.

In their prefaces, Beauvoir and Kristeva acknowledge their scholarly deficiencies in Chinese language and history, presenting their respective texts not as serious academic studies, but rather as collections of personal reflections and open-ended interpretations.188

Beauvoir had no linguistic training, Kristeva had recently completed a licence (B.A.) in

Chinese, and both women’s knowledge of Chinese history and culture were limited to a handful of works by Western sinologists such as Marcel Granet and Joseph Needham.

Neither writer had any training in anthropology or sociology, as might befit the author of an ethnographic travelogue. In fact, if one were to situate these texts within the body of their more well-known works, La longue marche and Des Chinoises represent, perhaps, at once the most obscure and most criticized of their publications.

Notably, Gayatri Spivak in “French Feminism in an International Frame” finds fault with Kristeva’s lack of analytical rigor, particularly her “stupendous generalizations” and “wishful use of history” which ultimately result in the reinforcement of the colonialist tendencies Kristeva herself criticizes.189 For Spivak, Des Chinoises is emblematic of a particular strain of Western leftist politics exhibiting what she terms

188 Beauvoir would go as far as saying that she wrote it mostly for financial reasons in later interviews. Kristeva likewise noted in the 2001 Pauvert reprint that, due to a quarrel with her editors, she was unable to revise or edit her original manuscript before it went to press.

189 Yale French Studies, No. 62, Feminist Readings: French Texts/American Contexts (1981), pp. 154-184. 90

“colonialist benevolence.” Such clumsily executed goodwill is what results in, or supports the marginalization of Third World women in Western feminist discourse as a special class of subordinated women who are even more oppressed than their First World sisters. As Jinhua Emma Teng has noted, this phenomenon “represented a means not only of understanding cultural difference but also of asserting the superiority of women’s status in the West.”190 This production of a Third World difference is the same phenomenon that supported (and continues to support) representations of China as culturally backwards.

Since Spivak’s critique, a number of studies have interpreted Kristeva’s Des

Chinoises as an Orientalist project.191 Although she may not have intended it as such, and even self-consciously sought not to judge Chinese women by Western standards, she nevertheless portrays Chinese women as the Oriental “other”, a category always antithetical to the West. Beauvoir, likewise, has been criticized roundly for constructing a utopian myth in which Chinese socialism is a (superior) radical alternative to Western capitalism, and in which the emancipation of women figures as a key theme. Despite her critique of Western hegemony, Beauvoir, too, reproduces its hierarchical relations to the

“other.” As Eric Hayot has remarked, if even such “specifically anti-colonialist texts experience and contain forms of Orientalism,”192 what else, or how else can scholars in the Western academy write about ‘Third World’ women, then and now?

190 “The Construction of the “Traditional Chinese Woman” in the Western Academy: A Critical Review”, (Autumn 1996), p. 115-150.

191 Cf. Rey Chow. Woman and Chinese Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991; and Lisa Lowe. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

192 Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, The University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2004, p. 108. 91

In order to answer (or at least begin to answer) these questions, I propose a three- fold analysis: historical contextualization (what were the specific historical conditions under which these projects were undertaken), theoretical contextualization (how do

Beauvoir and Kristeva’s concepts of Chinese women relate to their general feminist theories), and textual analysis (where do the texts contradict or problematize their stated intentions). I argue that both writers construct a monolithic image of Chinese women as oppressed victims in the process of being emancipated by Maoist policies. This image furthermore serves as an instrument to advance a) socialist politics and b) avant-garde theory in France during two distinct periods of disillusionment with Western ideology.

For Beauvoir, Mao’s socialist transformations held political promise; Kristeva, however, located the potential for revolution in theory. The construction of a fixed Chinese identity, however sympathetic, to support politics or theory in the West ultimately results in a type of colonial discourse.193 Building upon Spivak’s critique, I contend that this colonialist gesture occurs via three modes: 1) the establishment of a binary relationship between self/other, the West/China, man/woman in which the “other” of each equation is always defined in negation to the dominant category; 2) the assumption of an ahistorical, universal category of Chinese women; and 3) the assumption of a direct correspondence between representation and reality (that textual representations are simple reflections of reality). I will then explore alternatives to these discursive modes.

193 I refer here to Homi Bhabha’s (1983) definition of colonial discourse as “an apparatus of power [... whose] predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for a “subject peoples” through the production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised and a complex form of pleasure/unpleasure is incited. It seeks authorization for its strategies by the production of knowledges by colonizer and colonized which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated.” Cf. “The Other Question - The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24:6, p. 23. 92

Let us first situate these texts historically. Beauvoir’s six-week trip to China occurred during a period of escalating tension between Eastern and Western blocs during the Cold War. This was a period marked by decolonization and the rise of nationalist movements in Third World countries often allied with, or perceived to be allied with communist groups. Although Beauvoir was not a member of the French Communist

Party, she was an outspoken critic of Western capitalism and colonialism. Her support of the anti-colonial struggles of the Viet Minh during the War (which terminated in 1954 in the defeat of the French), as well as her anti-colonial position on the French-Algerian War led her to be labeled anti-French by the French press. In April of 1955, Beauvoir and Sartre attended the Bandung conference, the first large-scale meeting of Asian and African states, many newly independent, to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation, and national sovereignty.194 As Western observers sympathetic to the socialist cause, Beauvoir and Sartre were invited by Chinese premier

Zhou Enlai to visit China during the implementation of the First Five Year Plan. This invitation, extended in the wake of Bandung, can be read as an attempt on the part of

Chinese officials to quell rising fears, among both communist and anti-communist nations concerning China’s growing power and alliance with the . Beauvoir was thus in the privileged position of witnessing and writing about China’s development as a new socialist nation – following of course a government-organized itinerary, and guided by government-selected interpreters.

194 Organized by Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India, the conference also aimed to oppose colonialism in all its forms, including Soviet policies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Bandung was an important step toward the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement. 93

In La longue marche, Beauvoir is writing against the dominant politics of the

West at a specific historical juncture: the Cold War. The text is a response to anti-China, anti-communist Western intellectuals who equated all forms of communism with Stalinist totalitarianism. Her chapter on the changing status of women in the family, for instance, directly challenges the anti-communist argument that socialist policies cause the degradation of family ties: “New China’s enemies take the regime very bitterly to task for the antifamilial policy they impute to it. The government, they charge, scoffs at, as good as denies the existence of blood ties, is riding roughshod over the most sacred values [...]

China is doing nothing of the sort.”195 Beauvoir erects in place of the myth of China as an autocratic state, the myth of a Marxist utopia. Her message is that Chinese communism is not Soviet communism; it’s revised, it’s workable, it represents the hope of freedom and progress. Specifically, for Beauvoir, Chinese socialism promises the liberation of women from a tyrannical patriarchal system.

While Beauvoir’s trip to China occurred in the midst of Cold War tensions and decolonization movements, Kristeva’s three-week voyage took place during a period of

French left-wing fascination with China, inspired largely by the Chinese Cultural

Revolution (1966-1976). Leading up to and during the revolt of May 1968, there was a heightened interest in Mao Zedong Thought and the political struggles in revolutionary

China with intellectuals such as Beauvoir and Sartre sympathizing with the Maoist group

La Gauche prolétarienne. 196 Tel Quel’s Maoist period (1971-1976) coincided with the

195 LM, 127.

196 The May ’68 protests, driven by a coalition of students eager to shake up the “old society” and traditional moral values, and over 11 million French workers, culminated in a large that nearly collapsed the economy. Between 1971 and 1974, France was in a period of great unrest. On the 94

review’s poststructuralist phase.197 Its editors were fascinated by Mao Zedong Thought largely for literary and philosophical reasons. They hoped to show that social revolution could be achieved through avant-garde art, and that social realism was not the only aesthetic possibility resulting from the alliance between communism and the arts. From

1972 onwards, traveling to China became popular (partly as the result of China joining the United Nations), and the Tel Queliens took the opportunity to embark on their own journey to the PRC. At the time of Tel Quel’s visit (April to May 1974), its editorial committee did not belong to the French Communist Party, and were staunchly anti-

Stalinist. Kristeva, having fled the Bulgarian communist regime for life in France, expressed skepticism of communist ideology. For her, China was interesting not so much as a socio-political model, but as a theoretical lens, a figure of whose radical cultural and linguistic differences enabled her to theorize in new ways about language, writing systems, and the feminine. One could say that, “Tel Quel ‘exploited’ China for its own ‘theoretical exigencies,’ as nineteenth-century Orientalists had done before them.”198 Des Chinoises portrays Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a nonviolent movement

streets and in factories, there were frequent clashes between activists and police. Many intellectuals sided with the reformers (some more out of protest against the government-sanctioned violence than with the left- wing politics of the protestors). Although dominant narratives portray May ’68 as a student-led revolt against traditional values with few lasting effects, its ties to anticolonial and political protests, and relationship to Maoism suggest a much more complex, heterogenous event. See my analysis of Maoism in Chapter 3. Kristeva would remark in interviews regarding her later works, Le sens et le non-sens du révolte (1996) and La révolte intime (1997), that it was the metaphysical questioning of all values, power and identity – revolt as philosophical inquiry rather than political manifestation – that interested her in May ’68.

197 At the height of its influence in the 1970s, the journal was an important site for the development of the poststructuralist theory that became central in American literary scholarship in the 1980s. Regular contributors included Kristeva, Barthes, , and Gérard Genette.

198 Cf. Ieme van der Poel, “Orientalism and the French Left: The Case of Tel Quel and China” in Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East, C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen, eds., Rodopi: Amsterdam-Atlanta, 1998.

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that encouraged the participation of students and women. For Kristeva, Chinese socialism is valuable because it offers a feminine ideal of “self”: “Le socialisme chinois a donné un idéal au “moi” feminin, à tel point qu’on peut se demander si l’idéal du moi socialiste n’est pas fait pour les femmes.”199 Women of all ages are depicted as striving to live up to Mao’s dictum, “l’homme et la femme sont égaux. Ce que l’homme peut accomplir, la femme peut aussi.”200 To support this concept of a feminine ideal, Kristeva constructs a universal portrait of Chinese women based on a unique, matriarchal kinship model.

In order to examine how the image of Chinese women is produced, and subsequently employed to support Western leftist agendas, let us turn to the texts themselves. Contradictions within Des Chinoises and La Longue marche reveal a tension between the desire to avoid essentialist generalizations and the tendency to elide individual differences and historical changes. For example, Kristeva writes, “Il ne s’agira pas […] de dire que la réalité chinoise est observable à partir de nos modèles, de nos habitudes, et qu’elle se prête à nos lunettes.”201 Beauvoir insists, “J’ai déjà compris que ce pays n’est pas une entité politique, ni une idée à analyser: il a son climat, sa flore, ses moeurs; c’est une réalité de chair et d’os qu’il faudra essayer de déchiffrer.”202 However, both theorists frequently make sweeping statements such as “on peut se demander si, tout en restant sans réalisation sociale et politique, une sorte de maîtrise calme et précise ne

199 DC, p. 231.

200 Ibid.

201 Ibid., p. 68.

202 LM, p. 12.

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continue pas à être le trait caractéristique de la femme chinoise qui la distingue de l’homme,”203 or “pour la Chinoise, du haut en bas de l’échelle sociale, l’amour est affecté d’un coefficient négatif.”204 In order to produce a paradigm that would be applicable to

Chinese women as a whole, Kristeva and Beauvoir ignore potential differences between distinct regions, social classes, and ethnic groups, as well as between rural and urban dwellers.

Additionally, rather than accounting for history, both texts produce a simplistic dichotomy between traditional (Confucian) China and contemporary (socialist) China, in which one is revered and the other derided. However, while Spivak suggests that Des

Chinoises reflects “a broader Western cultural practice” of studying “the ‘classical’ East with primitivistic reverence, even as the “contemporary East” is treated with realpolitikal contempt,”205 what seems to occur in both texts is a privileging of the present at the expense of the past.206 Beauvoir, for instance, admits an utter lack of interest in classical

China: “J’étais indifférente à la Chine ancienne. La Chine, pour moi, c’était cette patiente

épopée qui commence aux jours sombres de La Condition humaine et s’achève en apothéose le 1er octobre 1949 sur la terrasse T’ien An Men; c’était cette révolution passionnée et raisonnable qui avait non seulement délivré de l’exploitation paysans et

203 DC, p. 132.

204 LM, p. 149.

205 “French Feminism in an International Frame,” p. 160.

206 LM, 8. Beauvoir reduces Chinese history to a few old stereotyped figures that merge seamlessly into the present: “La Chine populaire n’est pas née un beau matin de l’écume des mers, le passé vit en elle. Charrettes à bras, voitures tirées par des mulets, bicyclettes, quelques camions: des épaisseurs de temps se superposent, et je m’y noie.” (LM, 10). The past is collapsed into a few exotic images (men in broad straw hats, wheelbarrows, mule-driven carts, etc.), which are visible in the present, but about to disappear as China modernizes under the socialist regime.

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ouvriers, mais libéré de l’étranger toute la Chine.” While Kristeva also seems to value contemporary China over traditional China, the distinction she makes between the two periods has an additional layer of difference. Although she praises the socialist potential for radical emancipation, she also glorifies the Taoist tradition in opposition to the

Confucian tradition. She produces a second, hierarchal dichotomy within Chinese tradition, one that conveniently does not allow for any complicity between and

Confucianism, even though, as Rey Chow remarks, “perhaps it is exactly Taoism’s equation of the female principle with “silence” and “negativity” that traditionally allows its coexistence and collaboration with Confucianism’s misogyny.”207 In short, both

Beauvoir and Kristeva’s interpretations draw upon a Western epistemological model of

“progress,” in which socialist China is portrayed as undergoing radical political change and modernization – processes that ultimately result in gains for women’s rights.

Des Chinoises opens with a description of Kristeva’s encounter with a group of nameless Chinese peasants in the village of Huxian: “Une foule immense est assise au soleil: elle nous attend sans mot, sans mouvement. Des yeux calmes, mêmes pas curieux, mais légèrement amusés ou anxieux, en tout cas perçants, et sûrs d’appartenir à une communauté avec laquelle nous n’aurons jamais à voir.”208 Under the gaze of these silent women, Kristeva’s own identity is destabilized and becomes a central question:

“Qui parle donc, face au regard des paysans de Huxian?”209 As Spivak notes, Kristeva’s reflection on Chinese women is “obsessively self-centered” and barely masks a

207 Woman and Chinese Modernity, 9.

208 DC, p.25-26.

209 Ibid, p. 30.

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contemplation on the (Western) self. Here again is a European theorist seeking to question “the millennially cherished excellences of Western metaphysics” vis-à-vis the other, the non-West. Interestingly, in the moment of being looked-at-but-not-seen,

Kristeva recognizes her own gaze, hidden by “false colonial civility.” She wonders, what did the peasants do in staring at her but return her own gaze masking a universal humanism: “le regard innommable des paysans de Huxian, qui en fait, ne faisaient rien d’autre que me renvoyer le regard que moi, je portais sur eux sans oser le leur montrer, pétrie d’humanisme universaliste, de fraternalisme prolétarian et de fausse civilité colonialiste.” 210

It is that moment of irreducible strangeness that Kristeva seems to actively seek.

For it is in that otherness that something radically new (such as the revolution attempted but not achieved in May ’68) might happen in the West.211 Of the relation between May

’68 and the “otherness” sought in China, Kristeva notes: [...] l’alterité de la Chine est invisible si celui ou celle qui parle ici, en Occident, ne se place pas là où notre tissu monothéiste et capitaliste s’effrite, pourrit, se casse. Mais où? Ce qui vient tout de suite à l’esprit: les luttes de classes, les nouveaux appareils politiques et idéologiques surgis après mai ’68.”212

210 DC, 27-28.

211 Eric Hayot provides a brief summary of Kristeva’s long-running interest in a concept of strangeness, or exile as vital to bringing out “liberating change.” Cf. Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, The University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2004, 105.

212 DC, 28-29.

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Kristeva thus establishes a radical difference between “us and the villagers of

Huxian,” East and West, as a means of self-understanding, as a site of potential change – for the West. She furthermore locates this difference specifically in Chinese women:

[…] dans l’histoire ancienne mais aussi tout au long du socialisme chinois et jusqu’à nos jours, le rôle des femmes et par consequent la fonction de la famille ont, en Chine, une spécificité que le monothéisme occidental ne connaît pas. Observer la Chine en ce lieu-là, c’est donc essayer de la suivre dans ce qu’elle a de particulier: un regard cherchant à mésurer la distance qui me sépare de ceux de Huxian.213

It may be useful here to contextualize Des Chinoises theoretically, in terms of Kristeva’s position on the ontological category of “woman.” This task is complicated by the fact that, in 1974, Kristeva’s position was not yet fully articulated; the text can be read as a flawed, essentialist precursor to her later more nuanced analyses of gender and sexual difference. Although not evident in Des Chinoises, Kristeva has emphasized the danger of group classifications such as “woman”, “heterosexual” or “homosexual” that ignore individual differences. In place of a unified subject, she would later argue for a “subject- in-process.” 214 Yet, in Des Chinoises, “woman” is conceptualized as the “negative” of man, as existing “hors du temps, hors du savoir”215 that is, outside the framework of

Western history and metaphysics. Rey Chow suggests that in the same process of figuring women as “totally ‘outside,’ ‘negative,’ ‘unrepresentable,’ Kristeva makes China a place totally outside of, or negative to the West, so that “the binary oppositions

213 Ibid., p. 28.

214 Cf. “Women can never be defined” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1982; and “Julia Kristeva in conversation with Rosalind Coward,” Desire, ICA Documents, 1984. For an overview of the debates on the usefulness of Kristeva’s theory for feminist thinking, see Kelly Oliver, “Julia Kristeva’s Feminist Revolutions”, , vol. 8, no. 3 (Summer 1993).

215 DC, p. 30.

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China/West and woman/man come to mean the same thing.”216 The text is hence based, as Hayot notes, on two scales of difference, gender and culture, and sexual distinction is equated with cultural difference.

The binary system Kristeva adopts is manifest in the very structure of the book:

Des Chinoises is divided into two parts. The first, “De ce côté ci” (“From this Side”) presents a short history of gender relations in the Christian West, against which the second part, “Femmes de Chine” (“Chinese Women”) is evaluated antithetically.

Women are located outside the social order, voiceless: “Les femmes […] dans le monothéisme capitaliste, reste en deça du seuil de l’expression: sans voix, corps muet, toujours étranger à la cohésion sociale.”217 Women in the West exist outside the

“symbolic paternal order.”218 In contrast, her analysis of the conditions of Chinese

216 Cited in Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, p. 107.

217 DC, p. 29. It is interesting to note that, until her work on , Colette and Melanie Klein in the late 1990s, Kristeva seems to focus on women as mere objects of men’s culture rather than as agents of culture. In DC, the short chapter “Moi qui ne veux pas être” (“I Who Want Not to Be”) interprets the suicides of , Marina Tsvetaeva and Sylvia Plath as tied to the impossibility of women identifying with the male-dominated symbolic order: “si aucune légitimation paternelle ne se présente pour endiguer l’inépuisable pulsion non symbolisée, elle s’écroule en psychose ou suicide” (DC, 67).

218 By “symbolic paternal order,” Kristeva is drawing upon Lacan’s theory of the Symbolic. In Lacan’s theory, the father is assigned a dual role in the acculturation of the child: transmission of identity and prohibition of incest. Kristeva goes a step further, locating psychic repression in the actual structures of language: “L’ordre symbolique, tel qu’il fonctionne dans notre Occident monothéiste, avec, du côté des règles de parenté: filiation par transmission du nom du père, prohibition rigoureuse de l’inceste, et, du côté du discours: communication de plus en plus logique, simple, positive, “scientifique”, sans ambiguïtés stylistiques, rythmiques, “poétiques” – conduit cette inhibition constitutive de l’animal parlant à un apogée atteint et qui est logiquement assumé par le rôle du père. Du côté du refoulé, du côté de la “mère”, se réfugient dès lors […] des pulsions […] qui se marque dans les rythmes, intonations, gestes, traces non encore signifiants” (DC, 54). Entry into the symbolic order (composed of both symbolic and semiotic elements in dialectical tension) thus marks the origin (and repression) of the speaking subject in the social realm. Kristeva locates the “semiotic”, the playful, pre-verbal, pre-Oedipal stage of language (censored by the Symbolic but never fully lost) in a site of resistance she terms the “chora.” Part of her fascination for China, then, lies in the potential of the Chinese language to figure into her theory of the semiotic-symbolic : “La langue chinoise, conserve-t-elle, grâce au tons, un register pré-syntaxique, pré-symbolique (signe et syntaxe étant concomitants), préoedipien, même s’il est evident que le système tonal ne se réalise à peine que dans la syntaxe (comme le fait le système phonologique en français par exemple, qui atteint sa 101

women reveals a sexual and social economy wholly other to the West, one that retains traces of a matrilocal system (repressed by Confucianism). In contrast to the monotheistic West (an entity generalized across diverse Indo-European cultures), Chinese society is represented as having two kinship models, an ancient system based on “la mère au centre” and the contemporary “famille féodale confucéenne patriarcale contre laquelle va se battre la révolution socialiste.”219

In a broad, historiographical gesture, Kristeva traces this shift in models to around

B.C. 1000. Evidence for the original matriarchal system is based on folklore, Marcel

Granet’s writings on Chinese civilization, Lévi-Strauss’ work on the elementary structures of kinship, and a handful of translated works of Chinese literature, including manuals of the Art of the Bedchamber circa the first century A.D., and a Qing Dynasty classic, The Dream of the Red Pavilion. Without devoting any attention to problems of translation, or inquiring into the status of the two latter works (are they typical, marginal, representative of a particular class, etc.?), Kristeva conflates discursive representations with material reality. The Dream is described as “un roman de la dynastie des Qing [qui] témoigne bien des moeurs des familles nobles, et on l’étudie beaucoup en Chine actuellement pour y voir le reflet de la lutte des classes indissolublement liée aux luttes intra- et interfamiliales.”220 No mention is made of how Chinese readers actually interpret the novel.

maturité avec l’acquisition de la grammaire)?” (DC, 89). Here, as elsewhere, as Spivak remarks, Kristeva essentializes the masculine as “logical” (and French) the feminine as “non-logical” (and Chinese).

219 DC, p. 74.

220 Ibid, p. 123.

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Beauvoir likewise constructs a utopian image of China as the new promised land, an “other” to both Western capitalism and Stalinist totalitarianism based on a handful of examples and literary texts.221 In the chapter, “La famille,” Beauvoir links socialist reform with a transformation in the status of women in the family unit. Chinese women are depicted as victims of the traditional domestic structure: “La famille traditionnelle brimait tous les individus: elle leur déniait à tous la liberté, l’amour et le Bonheur conjugal. Mais c’étaient les femmes qui en étaient particulièrement victimes […] je crois qu’en aucun pays du monde leur sort n’a été si abominable.”222 The improved conditions of women after the passage of the 1950 Marriage Act – which instituted broad changes in traditional marriage practices, including the banning of arranged , polygamy and concubinage, the introduction of free choice in marriage partner, and the legalization of divorce – is deployed as proof that socialism works in China: “la marche vers le socialism implique l’émancipation de l’individu, l’affirmation de son droit à disposer de lui-même. Le mariage, la maternité sont devenus libres. L’amour est tenu pour une valeur

“progressiste” […] Le chemin de la collectivisation est aussi celui qui fait accéder la femme à une dignité humaine, les jeunes gens à la liberté.”223

These optimistic observations appear guided more by hearsay and discursive representations than by a critical analysis of material conditions. Although Beauvoir chafes at initially seeing only “symbolic signs” of China (pagodas, temples, The Great

221 Cf. Denis Charbit, "Voyage en Utopie: La Chine de Simone de Beauvoir," Perspectives 11 (2004), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, p. 209-237.

222 LM, p. 126.

223 Ibid, p. 159.

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Wall, rickshaws, etc.) with limited access to Chinese “reality,” she claims that over the course of six weeks, she is able to encounter the “real” China via her Chinese acquaintances (all of whom are Francophone or at least Anglophone), and her unsupervised walks in town. For instance, a quote from a single woman of privileged class is used to support the generalization that “[toute] Chinoise, du haut en bas de l’échelle sociale,” views love negatively, whereas “En Occident, même la femme qui place son métier par-dessus tout accorde une valeur positive à l’amour.” Beauvoir continues, “il faut qu’elle soit entièrement délivrée du poids du passé pour pouvoir adopter une attitude positive où elle féliciterait non d’échapper à l’amour, mais d’être libre d’aimer à sa guise.” 224 The implication is that the liberation of Chinese women entails emancipating oneself from the weight of China’s burdensome paternalistic past, adopting a positive attitude towards love, and ultimately, to be as free to love as the bourgeois Western woman.

In addition, by comparing what she sees and hears around her to what she’s read in books, she confidently concludes that Chinese Communism is “admirablement adapté aux besoins concrets de la nation,”225 and that Communism “apparaît donc pour les peuples d’Asie comme l’unique salut possible.”226 Her interpretation appears to be based largely on using “living examples” to “complement and round out” textual

224 Ibid., p. 149.

225 Ibid., p. 484.

226 Ibid., p. 483.

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representations of China circulating in the West.227 This method of reading another culture undergirds Beauvoir’s construction of an ideal, modern China where “le capitalisme, la propriété privée, le profit, l’héritage […] sont appelés à disparaître par

étapes, sans violence.”228 That is, Beauvoir’s China pre-exists her trip, the Chinese are already constituted in her imagination before they even enter into the realm of social engagement. By defining Chinese women in advance as a uniform group, Beauvoir overlooks the fact that women are produced through social relations as well as implicated in forming them. In effect, to a certain extent, she seems to be repeating Sartre’s intellectualization of the “experience of being black” in Orphée Noir. As Fanon has famously argued, “Sartre’s mistake was not only to seek the source of the source but in a certain sense to block that source [...] And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.” 229

In her reaction against the homogenizing tendencies of the dominant anti-China discourse of the , Beauvoir, like Kristeva, ultimately reproduces the same structures of homogenization and cultural relativism. This tendency to concurrently criticize and reproduce hegemonic thought also underlies her theorization of “woman” as the “other” of man: “woman is defined exclusively in relation to man.”230 In a phrase which sums up both French feminist representations of Chinese women (as Rey Chow notes, simply

227 “Les livres n’ont pris leur poids de vérité que grâce à ces exemples vivants qui les complétaient, grâce aussi à tout le contexte dans lequel je les lisais” (LM, 21-22).

228 Ibid., p. 10.

229 Cf. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press: NY, 1967, p. 134.

230 , Vintage Books: New York, 1989, p. 139.

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replace “man” with “the Western theorist” and “woman” with “China”), Beauvoir asserts,

“Man feminizes the ideal he sets up before him as the essential Other, because woman is the material representation of alterity.”231 For Beauvoir, woman has no ontological status independent of man, she does not, cannot exist except as the mirror image of man.

Within this Hegelian model, China and Chinese women are folded into the “other” category in opposition to the West. Although Beauvoir sets out to censure hegemonic relations, her approach reinforces binary divisions between China/the West, and between men and women.

To a large extent, Kristeva and Beauvoir were bound by their historical and theoretical contexts. In employing a of difference based on the categories of self and other, they advanced the ideas of the very ideology they hoped to criticize. This ironic consequence was amplified by the generic conventions and commercial nature of the travel narrative form. As personal reflections on the experience of being a foreigner in an exotic land, travel essays reflect more about the values and concerns of the observer than the observed; as texts written for a popular audience, travel writing is often constrained by commercial pressures exerted by the publishing industry.

He-Yin Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism

In imagining what an analysis that does not rely on binary categories might look like, the work of early twentieth century anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen (1884-1920?) offers a helpful counterpoint. In contrast to Beauvoir and Kristeva who ultimately reinforce the binary opposition between “East” and “West,” He-Yin’s analytical approach

231 Ibid., p. 179. 106

suggests that the world “cannot be dichotomized into native and non-native, Chinese and non-Chinese, male and female;” it is “Chinese and global at the same time and it is always already gendered.”232 Although He-Yin is considered one of the founders of

Chinese feminism, her work has been largely forgotten, obscured by the greater fame of her husband, renowned classical scholar Liu Shipei, with whom she founded and edited the journal Natural Justice (Tien Yee or Tian Yi) in 1907, along with the revolutionary nationalist Zhang Ji.233 Because they both used pen names, and sometimes wrote collaboratively, He-Yin’s work has often been misattributed to her husband. As seen in

Chapter One, the Tokyo-based Natural Justice was one strand of an emerging Chinese anarchist movement exiled abroad; what is less well-known is that Natural Justice was also the official organ of the Society for the Restoration of Women’s Rights (Nüzi Fuqian

Hui), which sought to eradicate male dominance and change subservient female behavior.

For example, it prohibited serving as a concubine or second wife, and came to the aid of any woman oppressed by her husband.234

The recent translation of He-Yin Zhen’s essays in The Birth of Chinese Feminism has confirmed her authorship on several new articles, and made available for the first

232 The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p. 38. 233 He-Yin Zhen’s relative obscurity may also be attributed to her staunch anti-militarism, which may have been seen by contemporaries as ineffective in the face of China’s pressing problems, including both internal conflicts and external threats: widespread poverty, famine, civil war, subjugation at the hands of both Manchus and Westerners. In addition to founding Natural Justice, He-Yin and Liu also wrote for Minbao (People’s Journal), the main organ of Sun Zhongshan’s (Sun Yat-sen’s) Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance). Liu, a vocal critic of the Manchu regime, was nevertheless accused in 1908 by revolutionary nationalists of colluding with the Manchu government, and both Liu and He-Yin were effectively shunned from revolutionary circles after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. The end of He- Yin Zhen’s life is obscure; she is said to have entered a Buddhist convent after the death of her husband in 1919. Others claim that she died of a broken heart shortly after Liu’s passing.

234 Cf. Peter Zarrow. “ and Anarcho-” in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Nov. 1988), p. 796-813.

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time the capacious range of her thinking. As the editors assert, He-Yin offers a “total theory”, a systemic and systematic examination of the roots of oppression. While the origins of Chinese feminism are traditionally located either in a European-derived male liberal discourse of quan, or rights (voting rights, property rights, education rights, etc.), or in Western feminism235, Liu, Karl and Ko’s translation demonstrates that the Chinese women’s movement was not a mere offshoot of socialism, a complement to nationalism, or derivative of Western feminism, but operated in a completely different framework. For one thing, it introduced communism to Chinese radical intellectuals. The first chapter of

The Communist Manifesto was published in Chinese for the first time in Natural Justice, suggesting that communist thought was translated through feminism; that is, feminism introduced communism and other radical ideas to China, not the other way around.236 For another, He-Yin Zhen, unlike many of her feminist compatriots (both male and female) did not subordinate the “women’s question” to nationalist struggles.237 He-Yin also regarded the progress of Euro-American women in attaining rights with skepticism,

235 Many accounts of Chinese feminism trace its origins to translations by Liang Qichao and (both men) of sections of J.S. Mill’s On (1869) and Herbert Spencer’s chapter “The Rights of Women” in Social Statics (1851). Liang’s translation of and commentary on Mill in his 1902 “On the New Citizen” (Xinmin shuo) and Ma’s translation of Spencer in 1903 serve as foundational texts referenced directly or indirectly by key male and female Chinese feminists throughout the early 20th century. Thus, as Taiwanese scholar Liu Jen-P’eng has noted, native feminism, whether associated with male liberal, nationalist discourse or Western feminism, inevitably stems from outside (men as opposed to women, the West as opposed to China). In The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p. 37.

236 Marxism did not receive systematic articulation in China until after the 1911 Revolution (and especially after the 1917 Russian Revolution).

237 Many Chinese feminist discourses of the time were tied to a nationalist discourse of saving the nation. Reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao bemoaned the subjugation of Chinese women – through footbinding, concubinage, lack of education, dependence on relatives, etc. – as emblematic of China’s larger problems on the world stage. This largely male feminist discourse linked saving China’s women (via unbinding their feet and freeing their minds) to saving the nation (jiuguo). Women, were thus in a way, blamed for holding back China’s national progress. Once the Qing Dynasty was overthrown in 1911, however, little was done in terms of advancing women’s rights. A call for women’s suffrage was in fact vetoed by the new republican government.

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considering it a form of “sham equality.” In “On the Question of Women’s Liberation,” for instance, she argues,

To liberate women means letting women enjoy equal rights and sharing the fruits of all . If we decided to follow the model of the current European and American systems, we would get our freedom in name but not in substance and also would have equal rights in name only […] Asian women have generally been impressed by the advances in the civilizations of Europe and America. They believe that European and American women have already achieved the goal of liberation and are enjoying the equality and freedom whose precedents they are content to follow. There is no reason why in the age of women’s liberation our women should be satisfied with sham freedom and sham equality.238

Unlike many of her contemporaries, He-Yin did not consider Euro-American concepts of liberty or capitalist modernization to be naturally “better,” or opposed to Chinese tradition. Rather, she saw the imperialist powers of Europe, America and Japan as

“representing more advanced ways in which newly emerged and now-globalizing forms of oppression—industrial waged labor, democratic polities and female suffrage, enlightenment knowledge—could attach themselves to native forms of subjection,” to subjugate the poor and oppressed “on [an even] larger scale and in less delectable ways.”239

As an anarcho-feminist, He-Yin Zhen did not support nationalism or state government of any form. In an overview of how women’s rights were conceptualized in late Qing China, historian Mizuyo Sudo identifies four representative images emerging from the women’s rights debates, including “mothers to the nation,” “equals to men in

238 The Birth of Chinese Feminism, 59.

239 Ibid., 38.

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duty,” “seekers of new roles,” and He-Yin Zhen’s “disavowal of female citizenship.”240

Sudo suggests that all four images originated in the concept of natural rights but differed in how they conceived of gender roles; only He-Yin rejected the dualistic framework separating male roles and female roles entirely, and saw a fundamental contradiction between natural rights and women’s rights, as well as between natural rights and the nation-state system. He-Yin believed that women who tried to gain equality with men through traditional structures as warring militants, legislators or politicians only served to reinforce those oppressive structures. Noting the failure of broadened suffrage to improve the welfare of the poor in Europe and America, she asserts, “the roots of social inequities reside in the system of parliamentary representation itself.”241 She warns against letting the movement limit women’s liberation by placing into government upper-class women who would then oppress the majority of women.

Although some scholars describe Natural Justice as a predominantly anarchist journal, noting that only twenty percent of articles were devoted directly to women’s issues242, and other critics describe Natural Justice as “China’s premier feminist journal during its year and a half of publication,”243 what seems evident is that for He-Yin, there was no sharp distinction between the aims of anarchism and the aims of feminism.

Feminism for He-Yin appears to be, as Tani Barlow has described, “the record of

240 “Concepts of Women's Rights in Modern China” in Gender & History, 18(3), (November 2006), p. 472- 489.

241 The Birth of Chinese Feminism, 67.

242 Beahan, Charlotte. "Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women's Press, 1902-1911." Modern China Vol I. no. 4 (October 1975): 379-416.

243 Zarrow, p. 799-800.

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thinking about what a truly just society will look like” for everyone.244 For He-Yin,

“ implies equality among all human beings.”245 Tracing the origins of inequality to three aspects of social life: 1) the act of marking two concepts – such as man and woman – different, and thus, creating a hierarchy; 2) the emergence of and economic exploitation; and 3) the development of parliamentary representation and political structures that place power in the hands of a few (usually the wealthy and elite), He-Yin’s solution is the elimination of these fundamental forms of oppression. She proposes to destroy the very analytical categories through which difference and inequality is generated; insofar as the state protects private property, abolish the state; insofar as the family is founded on patriarchal forms of oppression, eliminate the traditional family. In place of the structures that produce oppression, He-

Yin advocates gongchan, or communal property, and equal labor.

In the essay, “On the Revenge of Women,” she further shows how the oppression of Chinese women is produced by and inscribed in Confucian scholarship and ritual practices (such as marriage and funerary rites) that have been naturalized over centuries of daily repetition. He-Yin does not conceive of the female subject as the ontological negative of man as Beauvoir and Kristeva seem to do. The “other” does not arise only as the mirror image of the self, but rather is pre-existing to the self. It is through social and political relations – namely scholarship and social institutions and rituals – that the pre-

244 Barlow, Tani. The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism. Durham and London: Duke University

Press, 2004, p. 14.

245 “On the Question of Women’s Liberation,” in The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p. 65. 111

existing “other” is labeled a hierarchical inferior. He-Yin notes that although Confucian teachings promote the subservience of women, a handful of male scholars champion the minority view that “husband and wife are counterparts of equal weight” and “of one body.”246 Conversely, some women have so internalized their inferior status that they publicly promote subservience to men, and these women are then, in turn, touted as exemplary models of womanhood in order to control all women. The “traitor Ban” for instance is cited as insisting that ‘it is proper for a husband to remarry, but a woman must by no means serve two men.’ ”247

He-Yin’s critique of Confucian scholarship and rituals as a principal means of producing systemic achieves its force by her skillful use of classical rhetoric. That is, she engages with Confucian texts on their own terms; she partakes in the same hermeneutical convention of commentary as one might find in the Book of Rites, the Book of Songs, or the Book of Changes. In order to expose men’s hegemonic claim to knowledge, she must prove herself as scholarly as the Confucian sages. In her effort to show that “Confucian scholarship enabled men to cater to their self-interest,” and that through ancient teachings, “the relationship between men and women thus became one of absolute inequality,” she parses case after case of textual excerpts.248 In the example below, the translators have explicated the source titles and separated the citations by

246 The Han scholar Fan Ying, for example, was sick in bed one day. When his wife came to attend to him, he got up to bow to her. When asked why, he responded, “A wife is an equal counterpart. In matters of stately sacrifices, [the principle is] to receive every offering with a proper response [and it should be no different in conjugal rites].” “On the Revenge of Women,” in The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p. 143-144.

247 Ibid., p. 146.

248 Ibid., p. 124, 128.

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bullet points, whereas in the original essay, He-Yin Zhen abbreviated titles and skipped lines in her citations because she assumed that readers, like herself, were well-schooled in the Confucian classics and had committed canonical citations to memory:

Song dynasty Confucianists followed with an even more draconian suppression and control of women; women were despised so much that they were cast beyond humanity. Since then, scholars and officials have held fast to the teachings from the Han and Song dynasties … As these teachings became convention, no one questioned how wrong they were. The shrewd who knew these teachings were wrong whitewashed them to further their self-interest; the dumb swallowed the teachings without a shadow of a doubt … all Confucian teachings are teachings that kill people. One by one, they can be listed as follows:

• Book of Changes (Yijing, the Qian hexagram): “[Although there is beauty in yin, it will not accomplish kingly projects.] Neither can the way of the earth, the way of the wife, and the way of the subject.” • Xunzi (chapter on “Rulership”): “The Son of Heaven [the ruler] cannot have a wife so as to announce to the world that he is peerless.” [translator’s note: this is a play on homonyms; the Chinese word for wife 妻, being the homonym of qi 齊, “being equal” or “a peer,” the citation refers to the fact that the wife cannot be a peer. In effect, she is addressed as hou 後, “after,” “behind,” or “queen.”] • Biographies of Exemplary Women (citing the Book of Rites, chapter 13): “Before a woman marries, she takes her father as heaven. When married, she takes her husband as heaven.” • Book of Rites (“Suburban Rites”): “The man goes in person to meet the bride, the man taking the initiative and not the woman [according to the idea that regulates the relationship between the strong and the weak.]” • White Tiger Discourse (“On Marriage”): “The rites of marriage: Why is it that a man takes a wife and a woman leaves her house to marry? It is because yin, being lowly, cannot have her own prerogatives; she relies on yang to accomplish things … etc.249

This piling on of examples may seem repetitive and heavy-handed to readers unfamiliar with classical Chinese texts, but reflects the standard practices of Confucian scholarship, particularly of the New Text Confucian tradition popularized by the Han

249 The Birth of Chinese Feminism, 124-125.

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school of learning.250 To attack canonical Chinese thought systematically in this way was truly radical for its time. At the book launch of The Birth of Chinese Feminism, the editors noted that He-Yin’s criticism of Confucianism is one of the first such comprehensive critiques in Chinese history – analogous to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s feminist attack on biblical scholarship, or Beauvoir’s analysis of biases against women in

Western thought in Le Deuxième Sexe.251

“On the Revenge of Women” is of particular interest as a counterpoint to

Beauvoir and Kristeva’s contemplations on the status of Chinese women under communism due to its handling of textual examples. Whereas Beauvoir and Kristeva tend to conflate discourse with reality in their reflections on Chinese women without exploring the reciprocal influences between text and society, He-Yin Zhen treats books as having an important role in shaping the existing social order. She advances that classical texts are not simply reflections of society; they espouse values that are ritualized, sedimented into cultural practices, and become embodied experiences. Her writings also offer a glimpse into the role East Asian feminists played as theory-makers rather than as ethnographic objects of study. Perhaps most importantly, she offers us a set of analytical categories that may prove productive in future examinations of the workings of societal hierarchies and inequalities.

250 The Han school of learning was conceived and popularized during the Western (206 BC – 9 AD), becoming the official interpretation of Confucianism. Although it fell into relative obscurity after the fall of the Han in 220 AD, it was reinvigorated and once again became a predominant intellectual trend and sociopolitical ideology during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).

251 Comment given at the launch of The Birth of Chinese Feminism at Book Culture, New York, NY, April 23, 2013. 114

Productive Categories of Analysis: Beyond Sex, Gender and Class

He-Yin provides two key analytical categories through which to examine social life and its various forms of oppression: nannü (literally ‘man-woman’; roughly ‘gender- class’) and shengji (livelihood). Liu, Karl and Ko have suggested that nannü is “a more comprehensive rubric than ‘sex-gender’” and that shengji is “a more enabling rubric than class.”252 Nannü, the most crucial term in Chinese feminist discourses of the twentieth century, is most often glossed as gender. Nannü pindeng, for example, is translated as gender equality. However, He-Yin Zhen’s use of the term is more complicated. In their attempt to account for the various valences of nannü as a category in Chinese and

English, the editors/translators remark:

Interpreting nannü as a kind of ‘gender’ has the advantage of assimilating He-Yin Zhen’s work into the discourse of late-twentieth-century feminism familiar to Anglophone readers. By the same token, it could ensnare us in conceptual traps. Translating nannü literally word for word – nan for ‘man’ and nü for woman – into two or several English words, ‘man and woman’, or ‘male/female’, is just as unsatisfactory because the literal translation could contradict He-Yin Zhen’s theoretical project, which takes nannü as a single conceptual mechanism, used as both noun and adjective, that lies at the foundation of all patriarchal abstractions and markings of distinction.253

Thus the translators choose to alternate between its various semantic possibilities

(gender; man and woman; male/female), and in some cases, leave the term untranslated.

The categorical flexibility of nannü would be impossible to sustain if one were to presume linguistic equivalence in translation; nevertheless, as Liu, Karl and Ko

252 Ibid. Nannü, they suggest, is “a mostly untranslatable conceptual totality that signifies not only gendered social relations between man and woman but also, more broadly, the relationship of the past to the present, of China to the world, of politics to justice, of law and ritual to gendered forms of knowledge, interaction and social organization” (p. 10).

253 Ibid., p. 11.

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emphasize, what is at stake is not the incommensurability of languages, but the playing out of “the theoretical resonances […] between nannü and “gender” or any other such categories in contemporary feminist theories, which have always passed back and forth through a multiplicity of modern languages.”254 Modern Chinese itself was in great flux at the time, exposed to novel translations and neologisms from Japanese, English and other mediated foreign language sources. Looking at the global interplay of these terms can provide insight into their limitations and uses.

To that end, it might be useful to re-evaluate the Western notion of “gender” in light of He-Yin’s concept of nannü. In Joan Wallach Scott’s essay “Gender: A Useful

Category of Historical Analysis,” Scott examines the utility and limits of gender as an analytical framework for three key theoretical approaches (feminist studies of the origins of , Marxism, and ). Noting that “gender” as a way to “designate social relationships between the sexes” did not appear until the late twentieth century,

Scott attributes its primary usefulness to analyzing “social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” and as a way of “signifying relationships of power.”255 While the concept of gender developed as a way of emphasizing the cultural construction of sexual difference, differentiating itself from biological “sex,” it also tended to reinforce the male/female binary. Furthermore, gender historians have applied

254 Ibid., p. 13. Among these multiple back-and-forth translations, Liu, Karl and Ko demonstrate the change in valence of the Chinese term xing, which originally entailed “character.” By the early twentieth century, it had begun to take on the meaning “sex-gender,” as in nanxing (male sex) and nüxing (female sex) via translations from English into Japanese and back into Chinese. He-Yin Zhen, however, seemed to be using xing primarily to denote character, as in female character.

255 In Feminism and History. Ed. Scott, Joan Wallach. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 1996. p. 152 – 82. 116

the concept across cultural and linguistic divides, as well as across historical time, leading to criticisms of its ahistoricity.

In more recent years, feminist scholars have started to question the biological sex/socialized gender distinction. was one of the first to question the separation between sex and gender in her 1990 classic : “If the immutable character of sex is contested” she wrote, “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”256 More recently, feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling urges readers to radically rethink the opposition between biology and culture, for “the changes [in sexual anatomy] that occur throughout the life cycle all happen as part of a biocultural system in which cells and culture mutually construct each other.”257

Elsewhere, Scott notes another limitation in , remarking that the concept of “woman” is based on sexual differences taken to be “natural;” this naturalized difference then justified the exclusion of women from partaking in the universal rights of man (in France, from 1789 until 1944). 258 Feminist agency, Scott argues, is paradoxical. As a movement, feminism aimed to eliminate “sexual difference” in politics, but to do so it had to use the group identity “women” – an identity produced

256 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990. p. 7. In “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex,” Butler credited Beauvoir for championing the view of gender as distinct from sex, thus opening up the possibility of gender as a choice. See Yale French Studies, 72 (1986), 35-49.

257 Cited in Dorothy Ko. “Gender” in A Concise Companion to History. Ed. Rublack, Ulinka. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 25.

258 Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 117

through difference. In order to claim equal rights with men, feminism reproduced the very difference it sought to eradicate. Scott’s rather optimistic argument in Only

Paradoxes to Offer is that despite the contradictions inherent in feminism, French feminists still managed to achieve greater parity.

He-Yin Zhen would argue that this parity – suffrage and parliamentary representation – is a false parity. As long as analytical categories marking difference exists, no true equality can be achieved. Allowing some women, notably the propertied elite, to vote or hold office merely reinforces the structures that produce inequality in the first place. Decades before feminist scholars began to question the gender/sex divide, or the distance between the subject and object of knowledge maintained by such categories of sexual difference (long held to be a patriarchal prerogative), He-Yin Zhen employed nannü in a way that collapsed such distinctions.

In “On the Question of Women’s Liberation,” He-Yin writes, “[men] created political and moral institutions, the first priority of which was to separate man from woman. For they considered the differentiation between man and woman (nannü youbie) to be one of the major principles in heaven and on earth.”259 Her critique of “nannü youbie” is not of the difference between men and women per se, but the marking of that difference, which subsequently creates gendered social identities, and forms of power and domination based on that distinction. Seen as a mechanism of distinction that has evolved over time, nannü youbie “was the foundational material and metaphysical mechanism of power in the organization of social and political life in China.”260 The marking of nan and

259 “On the Question of Women’s Liberation”, p. 53.

260 The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p. 21. 118

nü as unequal enabled material, or physical oppression in the form of enslaving, cloistering, prostituting, and otherwise maiming or abusing the bodies of women. In “On

Women’s Labor”, she shows how poor women, young girls, slaves and lower-class boys were all subject to such marking. Nannü is then also always already a type of class marking. The various forms of oppression generated by such marking were legitimized and reiterated philosophically, philologically, historically, and legally, through canonical texts and institutionalized rituals. As He-Yin repeatedly argues, the Chinese written character for slave (nu 奴) is inflected with the stem radical for woman (nü ⼥), indicating that “the body is nannü’ed and thus ‘enslaved’ in a political-discursive prison even before it is ‘sexed.’”261

Insofar as nannü is an entrenched concept in the patriarchal discursive tradition

He-Yin critiques, she seems to be attempting to undo “nannü” (or “undo gender” as

Butler might put it) from within the tradition that produced it. Questioning the category

“nannü” in this way allows her to trace the roots of women’s oppression to the category of distinction itself, and to propose a potential solution in the elimination of this category as an organizing principle of social life. This solution is perhaps most evident in “The

Feminist Manifesto” when she asserts that getting rid of categories that mark difference would bring true equality: “By [saying] ‘men’ (nanxing) and ‘women’ (nüxing), we are not speaking of ‘nature’ as each is but the outcome of differing social customs and education. If sons and daughters are treated equally, raised and educated in the same

261 Ibid., p. 21-22.

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manner, then the responsibilities assumed by men and women will surely become equal.

When that happens, the nouns ‘men’ and ‘women’ would no longer be necessary.”262

If nannü provides a totalistic rubric encompassing sex, gender and class, shengji

(livelihood) enables a broader critique of global modernity, capitalism, and the nation- state. For He-Yin Zhen, property relations and economic relations were key to gender and other forms of inequality. In the essay “Economic Revolution and Women’s Revolution,” she identifies the change from a communal system (gongchan zhidu) of marriage and property to a private property system – and the subsequent consideration of women as property – as the source of oppression: “the beginning of the system of women as private property” is the “beginning of the system of slavery.”263 While greed for private property first manifested itself as brute force and physical enslavement, it later developed into the acquisition of wealth and socioeconomic power, creating new forms of enslavement to the wealthy and powerful. Because the state was the protector of these new forms of private wealth, and subordinated women’s emancipation to the logic of the state, He-Yin

Zhen was deeply critical of all state systems. This perspective was radically different from the view of the majority of her contemporary revolutionaries such as Sun

Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) and Liang Qichao, both of whom saw the establishment of a republican state as the primary means by which to establish national and individual liberty.

This essay, which appeared in the December 30, 1907 edition of Natural Justice intimately links women’s revolution with economic revolution on a global scale, and

262 Ibid., p. 184.

263 Ibid., p. 92.

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proposes a notion of revolution far more radical than communist revolution per Marx and

Lenin. He-Yin asserts, “…if you desire to realize a women’s revolution, you must begin with an economic revolution.”264 She further defines an economic revolution as “the overthrow of the system of private property, [its replacement] with communal property,

[and the abandonment] of all monies and currencies.”265 In effect, she is calling for the abolition of monetary systems so that human relationships, and particularly, relationships between men and women, no longer need to be constrained by financial considerations:

“…we must first abandon money. Once that happens, economic equality would follow; the majority of men and women would no longer be constrained by money, and they could then rely upon their mutual love to unite in marriage.”266

Conclusion: Chinese Feminism, a Competing Universal?

As we have seen, Beauvoir and Kristeva’s accounts of Chinese women underscore the methodological difficulties of studying East Asia from a Western perspective – that is, from a certain “anthropological vocation” that assumes the ability of the West with its scientific methods and theories to understand “natives” better perhaps than they can hope to understand themselves. Although their constructions of China as a utopian space are employed in critiquing the West, Beauvoir and Kristeva sustain, rather than destroy, the hierarchical relation between Western theory and the Chinese subject.

Their production of a universal category of Chinese women is based upon a binary logic that defines China/Chinese women as “other” (negative, peripheral) in relation to the

264 Ibid., p. 103.

265 Ibid., p. 103.

266 Ibid, p. 103. 121

West (positive, central). This methodological flaw supports their projects of discovering, not so much the diverse, concrete conditions of Chinese women, but something radically new and different that might offer alternative modes of being and thinking – whether that be an ideal socialist regime, or traces of an ancient matriarchal system. The true center of these projects is not China or its women, as their titles or prefaces propose, but the West.

This approach not only limits theoretical analysis, it reinforces Western cultural imperialism. In recent years, a number of approaches calling for the “decentering” of one’s analytical strategy have been proposed. Aiming to avoid colonialist tendencies, these approaches propose that we look at specific groups of women locally – not in opposition to the West, but in relation to the various networks of power and resistance in which they are immersed and that they shape.

A few years ago (in 2010), Kristeva advocated a similar approach at a conference on contemporary Chinese women held at the 7 - Denis Diderot. The conference was associated with the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom, which was awarded to two Chinese women, Ai Xiaoming, documentary filmmaker and professor of Chinese literature at Sun Yat-sen University and Guo Jianmei, lawyer and founder of the Chinese NGO, Women’s Law Studies and Legal Aid Center at Beijing

University. 267 During the opening remarks at the conference the next day, Kristeva, chair of the jury committee, commented:

Voici une puissance émergente, la Chine, qui fascine et qui inquiète et dans laquelle - tout compte fait malgré tout- les droits des femmes progressent. Notre rôle, en tant que jury [...] est de reconnaître que les droits des femmes sont

267 An international human rights prize for women’s freedom, awarded since 2008 to individuals or groups fighting for gender equality and opposing breaches of human rights, the award carries a 30,000 euro stipend funded by Éditions Gallimard, Culture France and the Centre National du Livre.

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universels mais que leur promotion prend le chemin des diversités culturelles [...]268

In espousing the universalism of women’s rights, all the while insisting on acknowledging and respecting the particularities of Chinese culture, Kristeva claims that the ultimate goal of organizations like the Jury Committee of the Simone de Beauvoir

Prize is to work together with Chinese women and men to promote universal human rights – a task which she insists cannot be completed without taking into consideration the specificities of each civilization, each individual and their precise histories. Is this a correction, a lesson learned from critiques of Des Chinoises, or the staging of a repetition? What does it mean for Chinese women activists to be recognized by the West for championing universal values based on Western feminist thought? Given that such recognition can enhance Ai and Guo’s capabilities to make changes in China, one wonders if such a prize helps ‘native’ women improve local conditions while at the same time reinforcing existing imbalances on a larger, global scale.

The question remains, how does one avoid reductionism and relativism in analyzing other cultures? To start with, we might avoid imposing a monolithic, universal category of “Chinese women” by analyzing how theoretical categories are constructed in a variety of political and social contexts (accounting for rural/urban, regional, class, generational and historical differences) among particular groups of women. These contexts may, as Chandra Mohanty remarks, “often exist simultaneously and overlaid on

268 A recording of Kristeva’s remarks at the awards ceremony, Prix Simone de Beauvoir 2010 à Guo Jianmei et Ai Xiaoming is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Co6-KnkW4 For a longer text by Kristeva on her long-running interest in China, see her essay “Beauvoir in China” accessible online at http://www.kristeva.fr/beauvoir-in-china.html 123

top of one another.”269 Mohanty cites Maria Mies’ 1982 study of the lace-makers of

Narsapur, India as an example of a “careful, politically focused, local analysis” that avoids reductive generalizations by focusing on the contradictions “inherent in women’s location within various structures.” 270 By delineating the tensions between housewife ideology, self-perception, inter-relationships between the lace-makers, industry structure, and patriarchal norms and institutions, Mies reveals the intricacies and effects of particular power networks without reducing the women to mere “victims” or some other such simplistic category. The lace-makers are studied from their specific, concrete historical situation rather than in relation to similar or different systems in the West.

Although this study does well to avoid theoretical generalizations, its empirical methodology does not seem applicable to most humanistic studies.

A number of feminist scholars have proposed – the analysis of how race, gender and sexuality “intersect in shaping structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against women of color”271 – as a corrective methodology. Liu, Karl, and Ko, however, are skeptical of the potential of intersectionality studies to do anything more than resort to an analysis of identity politics complicit with a conception of the state grounded in the “very regimes that underpin and

269 “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review, No. 30 (Autumn 1988), p. 73.

270 Mies, Maria. Lacemakers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market. London: Zed Press, 1982. In Mohanty, p. 73-74.

271 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Politics, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, 139-167. Cited in The Birth of Chinese Feminism, p. 18.

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reproduce injustice rather than [provide] a way out of structuring forms of inequality.”272

Bringing He-Yin Zhen to bear on intersectionality studies, they ask:

If it is true that gender, sexuality, and race intersect to produce ‘women of color,’ do the same categories produce ‘white men’ as privileged subjects of the modern liberal state or ‘white women’ as women unmarked by race or class? If the answer is yes, then how do the same categories produce simultaneously the oppressor and the oppressed? How do they help us understand the structure of oppression, which seems universal and yet also quite historically specific?273

They point here to a fundamental flaw in the theorizing of race and gender in intersectionality studies. In articulating an identity politics for “women of color,” such studies ignore the ways in which modern racial categories are continually produced and universalized. He-Yin Zhen’s unpacking of the nannü category as a constantly

(re)produced and historically grounded political act goes beyond both gender as category and intersectionality as method. While Beauvoir and Kristeva’s Orientalism might be traced to their reliance on a dialectics of difference that privileged the gaze of the other,

He-Yin’s theorizing managed to escape the Orientalist gaze, not because she was a

“native” thinker, but because of her unique application of anarchism to feminism, and feminism to anarchism. Because anarchism is not interested in creating parity within structures but in dissolving the structures themselves, He-Yin was able to create analytical categories that transcend binary thinking.

272 Ibid., p. 19.

273 Ibid., p. 19. 125

CHAPTER THREE:

La Chinoise II: Translating Mao Zedong Thought and the Cult of Mao

In an iconic production still from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise, three young French students dressed in worker blues stand behind a disorderly mound of Little

Red Books, their arms raised, each waving a red vinyl copy in salute to Mao. Iconic cultural symbols of the nineteen sixties, The Little Red Book or Le Petit Livre Rouge, the popular appellation for Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, and the iconoclastic movie La Chinoise have come to emblematize the phenomenon known as French

Maoism, a political and cultural vogue among French leftists that conflated China, the cult figure of Mao, Mao Zedong Thought274 and the Chinese Cultural Revolution into a singular trope for radical politics and revolution. Based loosely on Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel The Possessed, La Chinoise follows the militant and didactic activities of five students of varying and political temperaments who have converted a bourgeois apartment outside of Paris into a Maoist cell where they listen to Radio Pékin, host seminars and debates on Marxism-, cite passages from Mao, and plot revolutionary deeds such as the assassination of the Soviet minister of culture in Paris.

The selected assassin, Véronique, also known as La Chinoise for her absolute devotion to the Maoist fight against capitalist imperialism, mistakenly reverses the digits of the hotel

274 As Wang Ning has noted, Maoism was never referred to as such by Mao or the Chinese Communist Party, which has canonized Mao’s ideas as Mao Zedong Thought, or “Sinicized” Marxism, or Marxism with Chinese characteristics in 1945 following the end of the Sino-Japanese War and the launch of the civil war between the CCP and the GMD (Nationalist Party). In Chinese, -ism (zhuyi) has a universal and formal connotation while “thought” (sixiang) is more individual and personal. Thus Maoism is purely an external, international appellation. See "Introduction: Global Maoism and Cultural Revolution in the Global Context." Comparative Literature Studies 52.1 (2015): 1-11.

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room number and kills the wrong man. Ultimately unsuccessful in their revolutionary project, the cell disbands at the end of the summer.

Although there is no consensus on whether the film parodies or champions the revolutionary political zeal of the young Maoists portrayed in the film, most critics would likely agree with Grace An’s description of the film as “portraying the ideological imagination at work in the late 1960s in search of alternative models and cultures.”275 I emphasize ideological imagination here in order to highlight the ways in which Maoism was an invented, discursive construct, the product of global translational processes that involved numerous interlocutors, institutions, collaborations, decontextualized appropriations and (re-)imaginings. Born in an era of political dissent marked by anti- colonial national liberation movements, the Cold War, and irreconcilable divisions within the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF), Maoism came to embody the hopes and ideals of leftists disillusioned with the failed promises of the dominant capitalist and socialist systems. During the long 1960s worldwide276, China served variously as muse, “projection screen,” “crucial detour,” and “flexible signifier” for

Western leftists who saw in revolutionary China the potential for a radical utopian

275 Italics mine. See "La Chinoise ... Et Après? Aging against Tradition." A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard. Ed. Conley, Tom and T. Jefferson Kline. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. 282-95, p. 286. Although the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1967 Venice film festival and was later considered remarkably prescient of the events of May ’68, most contemporary critics decried the film as extreme and unrealistic. The Marxist-Leninist students who inspired La Chinoise were especially offended; they saw the film as a gross caricature of their radical political commitments. In the aftermath of May ’68, Godard himself would admit that it was a “reformist” rather than a revolutionary film, made in the lab, disconnected from reality. Cf. Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, ed. A Bergala, vol. 1. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Éditions de l’Étoile (1985).

276 Following Frederic Jameson’s periodization, one could roughly refer to the “sixties” as a period from 1954 to 1974. See “Periodizing the 60s” in Social Text, No. 9/10: The 60s Without Apology (Spring – Summer 1984), p. 178-209.

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alternative to the widespread social ills caused by Western capitalism and imperialism on the one hand, and Soviet totalitarianism on the other. In France, writers and thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, , , , Alain

Badiou, and Phillippe Sollers have at one time or another taken up the “pro-chinois” banner, or been labeled a French Maoist by researchers of the period. As we saw in the previous chapter, Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva saw Mao’s socialist policies towards women as paving the way towards a global revolution in women’s rights.

Over the last thirty years, there have been a growing number of studies, including intellectual histories, memoirs, sociological investigations, and document collections published on French Maoism. For the last two decades, at least in North America, some of the richest scholarship has focused on the theoretical and political engagement of prominent French philosophers with Maoism. 277 These studies tend to exhibit two main trends: incisive critiques of the Orientalism of French Maoists, and attempts to rethink

French thought and politics from a transnational perspective. In the first case, scholars of

Orientalism criticize Maoist intellectuals’ tendency to idealize and reify China as a radical cultural and political “other” in the service of specific (Western) theoretical agendas, thereby reinforcing the very societal structures they aimed to challenge in the

277 For various approaches, see Belden Fields. "French Maoism." Social Text. no. 9/10 (spring – summer 1984): 148-77; Richard Wolin. The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution and the Legacy of the 1960s. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2010); Julian Bourg. "The Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism of the 1960s." History of European Ideas vol. 31.no. 4 (2005): 472-90; Hayot, Eric. Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (2004); Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, (1991); Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1993); Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "French Feminism in an International Frame." Yale French Studies no. 62, Feminist Readings: French Texts/American Contexts (1981): 154-84.

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first place.278 More recently, a number of studies have turned to an earlier Maoist moment, one prior to May 1968: Althusser’s engagement with China during a particularly fraught moment within French Marxist circles. Camille Robcis, for example, claims that Althusser’s China and his interpretation of Marx were responses to the political and theoretical impasses confronting French Marxism during the early 1960s.279

Wolin’s Wind from the East offers perhaps one of the most comprehensive portraits, connecting the Maoism of diverse figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault,

Alain Badiou and Philippe Sollers. While critical of their fanciful and misguided appropriations of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Wolin argues that French Maoism nevertheless inspired not only theoretical innovation but also a number of important social movements, challenging the assumption that Maoism (and more generally, the contestatory spirit of May ’68) was an error of youth that merely resulted in a return to the status quo.

These studies of Maoism as an Orientalist and transnational phenomenon provide valuable insights into why and how China served as an especially salient muse for the

278 Spivak, as elaborated in Chapter Two, has famously criticized Kristeva’s Orientalist Des Chinoises, and the more general “inbuilt colonialism of First World feminism toward the Third” (“French Feminism,” 184). For Rey Chow, the Maoist philosopher is a “special class of Orientalist” who identifies with the oppressed from a position of power and authority, erasing the socio-economic inequalities between herself and true subalterns, and depriving the oppressed of a language of protest. Lisa Lowe has suggested that China/the Orient was a rich signifier for theorists like Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes who used China to develop post-structural linguistic and psychoanalytic theories. In a similar vein, in his analysis of the literary journal Tel Quel’s fascination with China in the early 1970s, Eric Hayot has advanced that, despite their blatant Orientalism, avant-garde European intellectuals’ uses of China for aesthetic, cultural and political renewal has much to tell us about the development and limits of twentieth-century French thought.

279 Camille Robcis. "‘China in Our Heads’: Althusser, Maoism, and ." Social Text Vol. 30 No. 1 (Spring 2012).

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development of French theory during the 1960s and 70s. Critics of Maoism decry the tendency of Maoists to write about and idealize China without any knowledge of the country, its customs or especially, its language. While I agree with postcolonial critiques of Orientalism, and Wolin’s claims that, despite their Orientalist misreadings, Maoist intellectuals’ engagement with China proved to be theoretically and politically enriching,

I am wary of the general focus on a few prominent philosophers and French texts, and a periodization that seems to either conflate Maoism with May ’68, or divide the phenomenon into a before and after May ’68 – as if May were the determining event rather than the other way around, or, as Wolin writes, as if Maoists were “the heirs of

May 1968’s emancipatory quest,” even though Maoist activities predated the revolts of

May.280 The exclusive focus on avant-garde French theory obscures the multidimensional and syncretic aspects of French Maoism. For one thing, it leaves out the role of Maoist

China’s rather significant translation machine in spreading Mao Zedong Thought and shaping perceptions of China worldwide. For another, it overlooks the role of workers and anti-colonial “Third World” movements, many of which began to coalesce in France and elsewhere worldwide in response to or in tandem with Maoism. Moreover, the representation of May ’68 as a pivot point obscures the relationship between Maoism and

May ‘68, and reinforces the myth of May as a Paris-based youth revolt, and of Maoism as a student and professor-led movement.

Although May ’68 and Maoism had deep connections to the university milieu, both movements were also clearly much broader and more heterogenous. As Kristin Ross

280 Wolin, Wind from the East, p. 4.

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has argued, the popular perception of May ‘68 as a student revolt erases the participation of workers and third-world militants, as well as the pre-history of May and its origins in the Algerian and Vietnam wars. After all, not only students went on strike. Over nine million people across all industries stopped working, leaving the country at a standstill for over five weeks. The immediate trigger of the student strikes, furthermore, was the anti-war protest of the Maoist grassroots group Comité Vietnam de base on March 22.

While I will not argue that the “intoxication” with Mao in France approaches May ’68 in terms of scope and legacy, it was certainly not merely a marginal, intellectual phenomenon – a “thunderbolt,” in the words of one critic, that flashed hot and bright only to vanish within a decade.281 In fact, it seems safe to say that French Maoism spanned at least two decades and is still relevant in some circles today, as Badiou has consistently argued.282

In short, the existing scholarship on Maoism raises several questions: Was French

Maoism really the sole province of a marginal, elite group of leftist French philosophers and writers? What are we to make of, on the one hand, the characterization of French

Maoism as a radical, anti-intellectual movement spearheaded by elite intellectuals a step removed from (or as most accounts put it, a step behind) May ‘68, and on the other,

French Maoism as a popular, cultural movement encompassing art, fashion, music, and

281 Christophe Bourseiller. Les Maoïstes: La Folle Histoire Des Gardes Rouges Français. Paris: Plon, 1996.

282 See “An Interview with Alain Badiou” conducted by Eric Hazan. https://kasamaarchive.org/2008/11/03/badiou-on-different-streams-within-french-maoism/

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film thoroughly enmeshed with – even derivative of – the broader May revolts283? How did it function within the radical decolonization movements of the period? Could the

French fascination with Mao, as Camille Robcis asks, “perhaps operate as a deflection of its colonial worries?”284 And if it did so, how are we to reconcile the simultaneous Maoist engagement of anticolonial African thinkers, students, and workers with elite theoretical concerns that may deflect or mask Maoism’s Third Worldism?285

I would like to suggest that Maoism, like May ’68, was a more heterogenous phenomenon than leading accounts portray. It was more than the “heir of May 1968,” its

283 Wolin has written in passing on the pop culture aspect of Maoism, such as the fashionable trend of Mao collars and canvas army messenger bags; a cover of the tabloid magazine Lui featuring a model dressed as an armed Maoist in the 1960s. See Wind From the East. For an account of the role of Chinese Cultural Revolution art on the student posters produced during May ’68 at the Atelier Populaire des Beaux Arts, see Victoria H.F. Scott, “Silk Screens and Television Screens: Maoism and the Posters of May and June 1968 in Paris, PhD dissertation, SUNY Binghamton, 2010.

284 Robcis, Camille. "May '68 and the Ethical Turn in French Thought." Modern Intellectual History, p. 267-77, p. 271.

285 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the complex relationship between African Francophone activists and Maoist trends in France, it should be noted that there were numerous links between the two. The Fédération des Étudiants d’Afrique noire en France (FEANF, founded 1950), for example, sent delegates to Maoist China a few years after the Bandung conference, in 1959. Radical organizations such as the Maoist Gauche prolétarienne, the UCF-ml, and the Trotskyist Révolution Afrique helped to politicize African workers in migrant neighborhoods, offering literacy classes, and helping to organize political activities, such as the first collective migrant housing protest. Leftist Antillean students in Paris interacted with Maghrebin, African and other colonial students; Mantouba, the political organ of the Association Générale des Étudiants Martinicans (AGEM) stressed the importance of connecting students and workers. AGEM activists began conducting enquêtes (interviews) among Antillean factory workers in Paris years before the UJCml and GP began to do so. It is not clear from this initial research to what degree these student activists and workers embraced Mao’s call for the solidarity of Third World peoples against Soviet-American imperialism; if the practice of enquête arose out of engagement with the texts of Mao, with other Maoist individuals or groups, or both; or whether any of these groups considered themselves “Maoist.” See Dieng, A. A. Les grands combats de la FEANF: De Bandung aux indépendances, 1955- 1960. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009; Les premiers pas de la FEANF: De l’Union française à Bandung. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003; and Mémoires d’un étudiant africain. Vol. II. De l’Université de Paris à mon retour au Sénégal (1960-67). Dakar: CODESRIA, 2011. See also Dedieu, Jean-Philippe and Aissatou Mbodj- Pouye "The First Collective Protest of Black African Migrants in Postcolonial France (1960-1975): A Struggle for Housing and Rights." Ethnic and Racial Studies 39.6: 958-75; Deshpande, G.P. and Gupta, H.K. United Front against Imperialism: China's Foreign Policy in Africa. Bombay: Somaiyas 1986; and Larkin, Bruce D. China and Africa, 1949-1970: The Foreign Policy of the People's Republic of China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

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harbinger, or the “Chinese dreams” of an elite group of established philosophers and brilliant young Althusser disciples.286 It may have achieved a certain momentum and status via the work of French intellectuals, but it came into being from the travels, translations, and transculturation activities of diverse groups – at times collaborative, at other times conflicting – of students, workers, intellectuals, and immigrants.287 Given that both Maoism and May ’68 are largely dismissed today as politically ineffective and utopian in dominant media accounts, part of my goal in illuminating the relationship between the two is to recuperate the history of these two movements. Reactionary politics, such as that embodied by ex-French President ’s call to

“liquidate May ’68,” have served to erase the revolutionary and political aspects of May, recuperating originally subversive slogans such as “Vivre sans contrainte and jouir sans entrave” into the unofficial mantra of today’s privileged class. By analyzing the processes of translation and diffusion of Mao’s ideas during this period, including their circulation among diverse Sino-French and “Third World” networks, and their translated forms, I will argue that Maoism was a trope of revolution created out of overlapping temporalities and rival concepts of modernity that ultimately transformed the very meaning of revolution.

286 While a few Maoist factions such as the Gauche prolétarienne and Badiou’s Union communiste français marxiste-léniniste (UCFML) grew directly out of May ’68, many other groups preceded the May revolts, suggesting a complex feedback loop between the two events, each opening up the possibility of the other.

287 In some cases, groups were simply unaware of each other.

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The Birth of French Maoism

Most accounts of French Maoism trace its origins to a global , particularly among leftists, that created fertile conditions for the adoption and development of alternative political and cultural models.288 In France, as in much of

Europe and North America, this crisis manifested itself as a profound disillusionment with the failed promises of both Euro-American capitalism and Soviet socialism between the second World War and the end of the Cold War. After World War II, the blatant contradictions of the Enlightenment teleology of modernity and progress became impossible to ignore: modernity’s exploitative power structures egregiously belied its democratic and emancipatory project; scientific and technological progress had led to the creation of the atom bomb, a weapon with the potential to destroy mankind; rapid economic growth in leading capitalist countries had not led to greater equity but to a culture of excessive consumption and growing inequality; the promises of Marxist theory had led to the sclerosis of Soviet state bureaucracy and brutal .289 By

1968, the rising affluence experienced during les trentes glorieuses did not lift all boats so much as produce an increase in social and political alienation, leading to declare in La révolution introuvable:

288 While Maoism was not the only alternative in circulation at the time – antitotalitarianism, humanism, third worldism, etc. all had their adherents – it will be the focus of this section, which examines why Maoism took such strong hold and then deflated, leaving room for antitotalitarian humanism to become a in the late 70s and early 80s.

289 For a history of this period, see , The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. London: Vintage Books, 1994.

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It is true enough: millions of people have jobs which offer no reason for living; neither production nor consumption can provide existence with meaning. . . If the present phase of history can be defined in terms of ballistic missiles, thermo- nuclear weapons, the moon race and the arms race, should we be surprised that part of the student population wavers between the negation of the hippies, an aspiration towards redemptive violence, and escape towards a new utopia?290

Aron's dismissive account of May '68 as a bourgeois "psychodrama," while patronizing and one-dimensional, nonetheless aptly captures the widespread sense of existential alienation, particularly among socially conscious middle-class youth who lamented the lack of political possibility under De Gaulle's Fifth Republic. Among French Marxists, the political positions of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF) in regards to the most pressing issues of the time – the Algerian War, the and the Sino-Soviet split – were indefensible and led to deep divisions within the French left. With the PCF’s passivity regarding anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements and its compromises with De Gaulle’s authoritarian government, the PCF was increasingly seen as betraying its commitment to revolutionary causes. As Julian Bourg puts it, leftists

“were stuck with a Party whose mythical role in the Resistance paled before its pitiful response to the Algerian War and its seeming abandonment of the world revolutionary cause. PCF rapprochement with the Fifth Republic meant a rapprochement with bourgeois and even religious culture.”291 That is, throughout the sixties, the PCF increasingly began to resemble just another entrenched structure in an oppressive system, one that “[funneled] young people into military bureaucracies to fight imperialist wars, or

290 Cited in Wolin, The Wind from the East, p. 1.

291 In Bourg, “The Red Guards of Paris,” p. 482. The PCF’s reconciliation with bourgeois and religious culture was confirmed by its alliance with Social Democrats and Catholics in 1962 in support of François Mittérand’s bid for presidential office.

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into capitalist bureaucracies … to earn a living as a supporting cog in a system of repressive privilege.”292

For French intellectuals and workers who were left of the PCF, the search for alternative models encompassed various forms and ideologies, including but not limited to a rethinking of /Marxism-Leninism (Althusser), Maoism, anti- colonialism, and Third Worldism, or tiers-mondisme. Maoism itself represented the convergence of multiple interests: it was a unique reinterpretation of Marxism-Leninism based on revolution in a Third World country that had been subject to semi-colonialism;

Mao not only positioned himself as a leader of anti-imperial Third World struggles but the Cultural Revolution became a poignant symbol of permanent revolution. For many

“early” Maoists (those who supported Mao prior to 1966), anti-colonial struggles in former French colonies such as Algeria and Vietnam became their link to Mao as an important leader and theorist of revolution, and to Maoism as a particular form of tiers- mondisme. Anti-colonial defense lawyer, Jacques Vergès, for instance, founded the journal Révolution, which is often cited as one of the first Maoist publications in

France.293 Subtitled Africa, Latin America, Asia, Révolution’s inaugural issue in

September 1963 celebrated third world independence movements and published texts by

Liu Shaoqi, then Vice Chairman of the CCP and President of the PRC.294 Born in Siam

292 Fields, “French Maoism.” p. 149.

293 François Fejto. “A Maoist in France: Jacques Vergès and Revolution.” The China Quarterly, no. 19 (Jul – Sep 1964), p. 120-127. Bourseiller, Christophe. Les Maoïstes: La Folle Histoire Des Gardes Rouges Français. Paris: Plon, 1996.

294 Révolution ran from September 1963 until December 1964, the year Vergès moved to Algeria with his wife, the FLN militant Djamila Bouhired. Vergès, like many European Maoists such as Jacques Grippa of the Belgian Communist Party, was exposed to Maoism not only through translated texts but also via direct contact with Mao and other Chinese statesmen over the course of several trips to China and to Chinese 136

and raised in the French colony of Réunion, Vergès had a distinctive transcolonial trajectory. The son of a French diplomat and a Vietnamese woman, Vergès, in his own words, was sensitive to the inequities of colonialism at a young age.295 Through connections with other colonial students while enrolled at the University of Paris, he became a confidant of , and a supporter of the Algerian and Palestinian armed struggles. Vergès represented a number of high-profile terrorism defendants including

Djamila Bouchired, and later in his career, defended war criminals such as ’s

Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan. Younger leftists, such as Robert Linhart, a key figure in student Maoist groups associated with Althusser and the École normale supérieure (ENS), likewise, was drawn to Maoism through an interest in tiers-mondisme.

Linhart was purportedly first exposed to Mao Zedong Thought through his travels and meetings with anti-colonial radicals in the newly independent Algeria in 1964.296 In effect, many French radicals including Linhart obtained Mao’s texts not yet available in

France in Arab or African countries, an interesting reversal of location from the interwar period when Paris served as a principal site for collaboration between African and Asian anti-imperialist intellectuals and militants.297

embassies in Europe, Algeria, Morocco and other “Third World” French colonies in the midst of decolonization. Cf. Bourseiller. Les maoïstes.

295 See the documentary film, L’Avocat de la Terreur (2007). Dir. Barbet Schroeder.

296 Linhardt spent the summer of 1964 in Algeria, where he worked in the Ministry of Agriculture and met a number of international revolutionaries, including Caballero, the son of Spanish Civil War refugees, who lent him many Chinese texts unavailable in France at the time. Cf. Bourseiller, Les Maoïstes, p. 55.

297 For a fascinating study of intercolonial collaboration in Paris during the interwar period, see Brent H. Edwards, “The Shadow of Shadows." positions: east asia cultures critque 11.1 (Spring 2003): 11-49. Edwards examines the partnership of Lamine Senghor and Nguyen Ai Quoc () on several anti- imperialist journals and newspapers as examples of an “intercolonial internationalism” – an anti- colonialism that was not nationalist in its aims but both working within and diverging from an emergent 137

As a vocal supporter of anti-colonial armed struggle, Sartre is often credited as paving the way to an emergent tiers-mondisme in his 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s

Wretched of the Earth. That same year, the book publisher François Maspero founded the journal, Partisans, which explicitly linked the journal’s support for the Algerian War

(1954-1962) with the “emergence of the third world … inaugurated by China”:

“[We] support the Algerian Revolution. We support it in a much vaster context, of which it is only one element: the emergence of the third world. We think that our era, and probably all the second half of the twentieth century will be dominated by the gigantic phenomenon brusquely inaugurated by China: the accession of people of color to the political history of the world, and their growing participating in its economic, cultural, and social history.”298

If the French Communist Party’s passivity in the face of anti-colonial struggle was seen as a betrayal of the revolutionary cause, the PCF’s allegiance to Moscow during the Sino-Soviet split served as the stimulus for the formation of the first Maoist circles independent of PCF control in 1963. In effect, the Sino-Soviet split was one of two “great events” that shook the Communist world during the late fifties and early sixties according to Louis Althusser in his preface to the English edition of For Marx.299 Althusser’s reinterpretation of Marx identifies the Sino-Soviet rupture and its catalyst, the Twentieth

Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as major turning points for the French left. During the CPSU's Twentieth Congress in February 1956, Nikita

Comintern internationalism. I believe the connections between this earlier intercolonial internationalism, tiers-mondisme and Maoism would make for an interesting future study, offering insight into the relationship between anti-imperialism, Third Worldism and communism, and how and why attempts at internationalism get dispersed so quickly into particularisms (nationalism, discourses of national, regional, religious, ethnic, cultural identity, etc.).

298 Cited in Robcis, p.55.

299 The original French text Pour Marx was published in 1965; the essays in the collection first appeared in communist journals between 1960 and 1964. The English translation was issued in 1967.

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Khrushchev made his famous secret speech denouncing Stalin’s abuse of power and his . While some French leftists commended the speech as a sign of the

CPSU’s openness to critique, the PCF staunchly denounced Khrushchev’s attempts to de-

Stalinize, going so far as to support the brutal repression of the Hungarian Revolution by

Soviet troops in the fall of 1956. The Hungarian Revolution in effect marked a definitive point of rupture for many disillusioned French leftists who then quit the party. A second major wave of departures occurred after the PCF officially sided with Moscow in the

Sino-Soviet conflict.

The CPSU’s Twentieth Congress led effectively to China’s rupture with the

Soviet Union, a rift that would ripple across Communist parties and party alliances worldwide.300 China found Khrushchev’s remarks to be irresponsible and revisionist, and began to distance itself from Soviet leadership, critiquing Khrushchev’s revisionist call for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialist and non-socialist countries, and boldly promoting a unique Chinese model of revolution with the launch of the Great Proletarian

Cultural Revolution (wuchanjieji wenhua de geming), Mao’s last effort to root out revisionists within the CCP. Between 1956 and 1965, the relationship between Beijing and Moscow progressively deteriorated, culminating in the CCP polemic, “On

Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and Historical Lessons for the World” – a text that is often cited as laying out Mao’s justifications for the launch of the Cultural Revolution.

Harshly criticizing the “revisionist Khrushchev clique” for installing a “dictatorship of

300 In a series of acerbic polemics, China and the Soviet Union openly criticized each other; the CCP and the CPSU also actively attacked each other at various Communist worker congresses worldwide, winning allies to each camp. For instance, the Communist Parties of Albania and Indonesia sided with China while those in Romania and France stayed loyal to the Soviet Union.

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the privileged stratum of the Soviet bourgeoisie” and restoring capitalism, Mao expounds the need for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” per Marxist-Leninist theory. 301

For many French intellectuals and radical activists, the Cultural Revolution symbolized a vital renewal of the revolutionary cause. The PCF, however, toed the Soviet line. Although the Party initially denounced Khrushchev’s secret speech, by 1961, it began to endorse Soviet reforms and calls for peaceful coexistence, triggering the critique of many left-leaning intellectuals, notably Althusser, for this seeming turn to humanism.

In his 1963 essay, “Marxism and Humanism,” Althusser links Soviet (and by extension French revisionism) to its embrace of humanism: “the Soviet Union has proclaimed the slogan: All for Man, and introduced new themes: the freedom of the individual, respect for legality, the dignity of the person.”302 Humanism became the ideological justification for the new Soviet policies of peaceful coexistence and peaceful transition, and for the PCF’s entrenchment in the political and administrative structures of the Fifth Republic.303 As a result of the Sino-Soviet rupture and the PCF’s humanist turn, the first Marxist-Leninist circles split off from the PCF to form the Cercle d’étude et de documentation, and the Fédération des cercles marxistes-léninistes in 1964, which was renamed the Parti communiste marxiste-léniniste de France (PCMLF) in 1967. One of

301 Also known as “Comment on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU (IX),” July 1964. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.

302 In For Marx, p. 221. Cited in Robcis, p. 52.

303 See Bernard Pudal, Un monde défait. Les communistes français de 1956 à nos jours. Paris: Éd. du Croquant, 2009 and Edward Baring, “Humanist Pretensions: Catholics, Communists and Sartre’s Struggle for in Post-War France,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 3 (2010): 581-609.

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the largest Maoist groups prior to 1968, the PCMLF was comprised primarily of workers.304

At the same time, radical student groups also began to splinter off the Union des

étudiants communistes français (UEC), the youth arm of the PCF.305 The UEC itself was divided into diverse groups of PCF, Maoist, Trotskyist, and “Italian”306 supporters. In

1964, the Italian student faction was successful in passing a resolution that called for the independence of the UEC from the PCF, and organizing a sold-out public debate supported by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. 307 Nevertheless, the PCF regained control of the UEC, and the “Italians” were expelled from the party, followed a few months later by the Trotskyists. The Maoists, led by Robert Linhart and the Cercle d’Ulm under the tutelage of Louis Althusser, stayed with the UEC and attempted to reform the party from within.308 Their goal was not to break with but to “[conquer] the

304 These early Marxist-Leninist circles were formed primarily of pro-Chinese members of the Association populaire franco-chinois and the Association d’amitié franco-chinois, groups originally created under the aegis of the PCF. The PCMLF was the largest and most Leninist of the Maoist groups. Unlike the “anti- hierarchical” Maoist groups (according to Belden Fields’ terminology), they subscribed to Lenin’s vision of a hierarchical organization, with centralized power and an elite vanguard leading the masses. The PCMLF also had the official support of the PRC. After being dissolved by government decree in 1968, they went underground and were little heard of.

305 The UEC was formed by the PCF in 1956 as a way to limit the influence of non-communist student unions, but began to have serious disagreements with its “parent” organization after 1963. See J. Bourg, “The Red Guards of Paris” (2005).

306 Sympathizers of , secretary general of the .

307 The discussion “What Can Literature Do?” was held on December 9, 1964 at the Sorbonne. See Simone de Beauvoir, Yves Berger, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jean Ricardou, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jorge Semprun. Que peut la littérature? Paris: Union générale des editions, 1965.

308 Although Althusser was critical of the “theoretical poverty” of the French Communist Party and its turn to economism and humanism, and consequently, in turn criticized by the PCF and disparagingly labeled “pro-chinois”, he never officially left the Party. For more about Althusser’s theoretical positions during this period, see Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Gregory Elliot, Althusser: The Detour of Theory. London: Verso, 1987. 141

interior of the Communist Party, in order to re-Bolshevize it and make it into a revolutionary formation.”309 Towards that end, the ENS Maoists began publishing the highly theoretical Cahiers marxistes-léninistes in February 1965.310 Between 1965 and

1966, a series of disagreements between the UEC/PCF and the Cercle d’Ulm, including the Maoists’ refusal to support the PCF-backed socialist presidential candidate, and their embrace of the Chinese Cultural Revolution resulted in a formal rupture.

In the November-December 1966 issue of the Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, the

Maoists of the rue d’Ulm, this time against the influence of Althusser, officially broke with the UEC. Approximately 100 members splintered off into a new group, the Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes (UJCml). The UJCml privileged class struggle, continued revolt against revisionist “theoretical fools,” and an affinity between

Chinese and French Marxist-Leninists. Leading up to May 1968, the UJCml led two major initiatives – one supporting third-world anti-imperialism via the Comités Viêtnam de base, and another organizing workers in factories, using the method of enquête

(investigation) adapted from Mao’s concept of proletarian democracy. Rallying around the famous Mao slogan, “Who does not investigate has no right to speak,” UJCml members went into factories and rural provinces to learn from workers and farmers.311

Dismissing the May student revolts as a petit-bourgeois concern, the UJCml completely

309 Bourseiller, Les maoïstes, p. 58.

310 The journal would publish its last issue in May/June 1968. For an overview of its publishing trajectory, see Chateigner, Frédéric "D'althusser À Mao. Les Cahiers Marxistes-Léninistes." Prochinois Et Maoïsme En France (Et Dans Les Espaces Francophones). Ed. Lanuque, Jean-Guillaume et al. Vol. 10 - mai 2010 Dissidences. Lormont: Le bord de l'eau, 2010.

311 See Donald Reid, "Etablissement: Working in the Factory to Make Revolution in France." Radical History Review.Issue 88 (Winter 2004): 83-111.

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missed the initial uprising at the Nanterre campus. However, the Nanterre uprising itself was triggered by attacks between the Maoist-supported Comités Viêtnam de base and the right-wing group Occident, which led directly to the closure of the campus on May 2.312

Furthermore, Omar Blondin Diop, a Senegalese Marxist-Leninist who played himself in

Godard’s La Chinoise, and was later rumored to have been killed in a Senegalese prison for his anti-government protests, worked closely with Daniel Cohn-Bendit in the March

22 Movement founded at Nanterre.313 Diop was expelled from the ENS St. Cloud (today

ENS Lyon), and from France for his involvement in May ’68 at the same time that Cohn-

Bendit was expelled from Nanterre and to Germany. Thus, while the Maoists are said to have missed the boat in May, it was in fact only certain members of the UJCml who dismissed the Nanterre revolts.314 Other Maoists, including members of the PCMLF and

Maoist anticolonial activists supported and joined the students and workers on the night of the barricades, May 10-11. Despite the differing attitudes of Maoist groups toward the revolts, it is apparent that Maoism in its various forms helped create the conditions that made May possible.

A period of intense self-criticism among UJCml leadership immediately followed the May uprising, and the group dissolved into various leftist groups. Some members

312 Bourg, “Red Guards,” p 489.

313 See James S. Williams. Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016. p. 23.

314 Linhart was especially adamant that the UJCml stay out of the student protests. Convinced that the rioting students were part of a “social democratic plot” to usurp the working-class’ avant-garde role in the revolution, Linhart went so far as going to the PRC embassy to explain to diplomats that Mao was making an error in supporting the students. Turned away at the gate, Linhart subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the rest of the May-June days in a hospital.

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joined the clandestine PCMLF while the core merged with the March 22 Movement to form the Gauche prolétarienne (GP). Until its dissolution in 1974, the GP was active in promoting a more militant form of revolt associated with revolutionary violence, including the kidnapping and sequestration of factory chiefs. Partially due to the support of Sartre and the renown of members who would later attain media celebrity as ex-Maoist

“,”315 the well-documented activities of the GP have to a certain degree become synonymous with French Maoism in general – in no small part because it was also seen, as Belden Fields writes, as the most “French” of all Maoist groups.

Distinguishing between “hierarchical” and “anti-hierarchical” Maoist groups, Fields links the anti-hierarchism of the GP to the utopian thought of Rousseau, Proudhon and Fourier.

In particular, Fields identifies a resemblance between Rousseau’s General Will and

Mao’s , noting that,

Rousseau … argued that … the executive structure would have to be forced to take direction from the masses and to be held accountable to them. In Mao, this becomes the ‘mass-line.’ Lenin’s model, in which the masses learn from, and is accountable to the party, is transformed by Mao into one in which the party learns from, and is accountable to the masses, in this instance, the Chinese peasantry. The chief example of this was … the Cultural Revolution, where the General Will (represented by the Red Guards) forced the functionaries, professors and officers back out into the fields and work places so as to reconnect government and masses. 316

315 A number of outspoken ex-GP members would become known as the New Philosophers, including André Glucksmann, Michel Le Bris, Bernard Kouchner, Benny Lévy, Jean-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner.

316 See "French Maoism." Social Text. no. 9/10 (spring - summer 1984): 148-77, p. 150. See also Fields’ manuscript, and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States. 1988. Fields contends that GP Maoism was “anti-hierarchical” in its desire to dissolve social hierarchies and traditional power structures, whereas “hierarchical” Maoist groups such as the PCMLF tended to adhere to a centralized party structure led by an elite vanguard. Fields further argues that the GP had “virtually no ties with the outside world,” removing even the little picture of Mao that was on the masthead of its theoretical organ, La Cause du peuple, for being too foreign.

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According to Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, Mao is known to have had a keen interest in French utopian socialism, and was familiar with the work of Rousseau.317

However, the point here is not who influenced whom, but the cross-circulation of French and Chinese revolutionary sources and their dialectical interplay as they took on different meanings in varying contexts. As Keith Baker has noted, since revolutionary concepts such as liberty and equality, and the idea of a social contract “have existed more or less confusedly in all human society,” trying to reconstruct a history of revolutionary ideas could lead to “an endless genealogical regression into the history of political doctrines.”318 To avoid such a regression, I will focus here more narrowly on the discursive mobility of key concepts and events that took on particular significance: how and why did the Paris Commune, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Third World come to be mobilized by radicals in the French and Chinese contexts to effect cultural revolution?

Thus far, we have seen how a political crisis within the French left and a wider societal discontent with the status quo created conditions conducive to importing alternative paradigms. China’s Cultural Revolution itself can be attributed to a crisis within the CCP. In effect, the theoretical and political impasses within both international communism and French Marxism converged with China’s own party crisis and Mao’s launch of the Cultural Revolution. In the wake of the disastrous

(1959-1961) and the Sino-Soviet rift, influential CCP leaders began criticizing Mao’s

317 Red Star Over China. New York: Random House, 1938, p. 134-164.

318 Keith Michael Baker. Inventing the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 23.

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policies, particularly the Great Leap Forward, which had caused a nation-wide famine.

Most famously, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, after meeting with Khrushchev in Tirana in 1959, openly criticized Mao’s cult of personality and the failures of his modernization policies, and was subsequently expelled from the Party. Internal dissent continued to fester, and the CCP pursued several social and economic policies that Mao considered conservative and revisionist. As the schisms between China and the Soviet Union, and

Mao and the Chinese Communist Party grew, Mao began to revisit classical Marxist theory and became particularly interested in Marx’s interpretation of the Paris Commune.

Although prior to 1957, little was written about the Commune in China, between 1961 and 1966 it had become the subject of several translated histories, journal articles, academic symposia and commemorative exhibits.319 As Chinese scholars debated the contemporary relevance of the Paris Commune (as interpreted and canonized by Marx),

Mao began to see the Commune and its realization of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” as a crucial model to emulate in order to forestall the embourgeoisement and

“bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution”320 – a degeneration that seemed to Mao as menacing at home as in the Soviet Union. In the CCP document, “On Khruschev’s Phony

319 John Bryan Starr notes that prior to the early 1960s, the Paris Commune is mentioned by Mao only twice – once in his 1937 essay “” and a second time during his speech at the Lushan Plenum in July 1959. In both instances, he seems concerned primarily with the failure of the Commune, and its pointing to an easy bourgeois reactionism. See "Revolution in Retrospect: The Paris Commune through Chinese Eyes." The China Quarterly. No. 22 (Jan.-Mar. 1972). Indeed, prior to 1956, Mao did not see Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” as necessary to the realization of socialism, nor applicable to China and its semi-feudal and semi-colonial conditions, and argued instead for a “people’s democratic dictatorship” unique to China. As this “people’s dictatorship” came under threat from the increasingly institutionalized Chinese state apparatus with its entrenched bureaucratic elites, however, Mao reversed his opinion about the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat to achieving socialist revolution; by 1966, it would become the central ideological theme of the Cultural Revolution. See Maurice Meisner. "Images of the Paris Commune in Contemporary Chinese Marxist Thought." The Massachusetts Review 12.no. 3 (Summer 1971): 479-97.

320 Ibid, p. 485.

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Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World,” the Paris Commune is identified as the origin of the international , and its overthrow as the beginning of a series of “capitalist restorations” (of which the Soviet Union under

Khrushchev was the latest).321 By March 1966, a major article published in Hong-ji (Red

Flag), the main Maoist theoretical organ, would mark an important shift in emphasis in the use of the Paris Commune as a model for Chinese politics: “peaceful coexistence” is doomed to failure; armed revolution and overthrow of the bourgeois state structure are necessary as is the initiative of the masses in the form of direct election and recall.322

The Communard uprising was officially deemed an important model of political reorganization in the famous “Sixteen Points” of August 1966, and became the model of political reorganization for the Shanghai People’s Commune of February 1967.323 In the

Sixteen Points, Mao articulated his agenda for “smashing” the bureaucratic-military state apparatus that he regarded as infiltrated by “capitalist roaders” and revisionists, calling for the masses to rebel against existing state and party organs in order to revive the revolution and install a true dictatorship of the proletariat.324 Red Guard manifestos

321 Comment IX on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU of 14 July 1963, 14 July 1964, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

322 Chen Chih-ssu, “Great Revelations of the Paris Commune,” Hong-ji (Red Flag), 1966, no. 4 (March 24, 1966).

323 “Cultural revolutionary groups, committees, and congresses are excellent new forms of organization whereby under the leadership of the Communist Party the masses are educating themselves […] It is necessary to institute a system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune.” Cf. “Sixteen Points: Guidelines for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century, compiled by William Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, 2nd ed., vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press (2000).

324 “Cultural revolutionary groups, committees, and congresses are excellent new forms of organization whereby under the leadership of the Communist Party the masses are educating themselves […] It is necessary to institute a system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune.” Cf. “Sixteen Points: 147

proclaimed that “the true proletarian revolutionaries” of China were now the legitimate bearers of “the red banner of the Paris Commune.”325 In its first year, the Cultural

Revolution was hailed in the Peking Review as “a new experience of extensive democracy” modeled on the Paris Commune and characterized by:

… [the] creativeness of the revolutionary masses… [the] free airing of views, putting up big-character posters, carrying on great debates, and going to other units and places to exchange revolutionary experience. The masses … have the right to criticize and make suggestions about Party and state policies, and every aspect of the state apparatus. The masses have the right to criticize leading cadres at all levels no matter how meritorious their service, how high their position, or how senior their qualifications. A system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune, is introduced without exception for all organs of power leading the Cultural Revolution. The masses have the power to replace through election or recall any elected member at any time.326

This heady description of the early days of the Cultural Revolution was borne out to a certain extent by the short-lived Shanghai People’s Commune, also known as the January

Storm. Between the end of 1966 and the formal declaration of the Shanghai People’s

Commune on February 5, 1967, rebel workers, militant students and revolutionary party cadres overthrew the existing government structure in Shanghai, and installed a novel state structure modeled on the Paris Commune. Although the Shanghai Commune did not introduce general elections or abolish the standing army, it nevertheless empowered the masses by transferring some authority to mass representatives and mass organs – for

Guidelines for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century, compiled by William Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, 2nd ed., vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press (2000).

325 Cf. Meisner, "Images of the Paris Commune in Contemporary Chinese Marxist Thought," p. 480.

326 Peking Review, No. 52, December 23, 1966, p. 18-23. Cited in Peking and the : At Home and Abroad. China Research Monographs. Berkeley: University of California Cetner for Chinese Studies, 1969.

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approximately a month. 327 Shortly thereafter, Mao decided that Revolutionary

Committees comprised of PLA, cadres and workers would make the most effective local government organs, and the Commune was replaced by the state-decreed Revolutionary

Committee of the Municipality of Shanghai.

In an ironic turn, the student rebels in France saw themselves as the “Red Guards of Paris.” It is no coincidence that the Maoist groups in France that followed most closely the Cultural Revolution practices of learning from and with the masses seemed the most

“French,” for they shared a grounding with Marx and Mao in certain utopian strains of thought deriving from the French revolutionary tradition. Camille Robcis’ comment that

“China is a French political fantasy” thus takes on a double meaning: “China” is the epistemological product of French thinking, and it is also, in a way, a utopia come to life, a concrete change in the political relationship between the masses and the state that draws upon an older French dream of continuous revolution and “communal luxury,”328 or as

Badiou recently put it, “La Révolution Culturelle est la Commune de Paris de l’époque des États socialistes.”329

327 Jiang Hongsheng’s dissertation, “The Paris Commune in Shanghai: the Masses, the State, and Dynamics of Continuous Revolution’” (Duke University, 2010) is one of the few detailed studies of the Shanghai Commune in English. It has been published in Paris by La Fabrique with a foreword by Alain Badiou as La Commune de Shanghai et la Commune de Paris (2014). The original English version is available online at: http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/2356/D_Jiang_Hongsheng_a_201005.pdf?se quence=1

328 Ross, Kristin. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London & Brooklyn: Verso, 2015.

329 In “Résurrection d’un paradigme révolutionnaire,” preface to Jiang Hongsheng’s La Commune de Shanghai et la Commune de Paris. Paris: La Fabrique, 2014. Originally cited in << Mao Zédong, textes choisis >> présentés par Slavoj Zizek, avec une lettre d’Alain Badiou. Paris: La Fabrique.

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Maoism’s Multiple Temporalities and Rival Modernity

The intertwined nature of the French and Chinese revolutions, the fact that

Chinese Red Guards were imitating the Paris Communards while the soixtante-huitards thought of themselves as Parisian Red Guards, tells us a great deal about the ‘discursive mobility’ of the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution through space and time, and hence about the historicity of the translation/event. At stake in China’s laying claim to a

French revolutionary tradition is its articulation of a rival modernity – a remapping of spatiality and temporality via a competing universal theory. China in effect offered

Western leftists and Third World radicals a “third way,” a promising path out of the impasse between “U.S. imperialism” and “Soviet social-imperialism” during the sixties.330 Attaining “a unique status as a universal form of philosophy and knowledge that no other Chinese thought has ever achieved,”331 Maoism became the global name for a theory of revolution canonized in China as Mao Zedong Thought. Based, theoretically, on an alternative interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, and grounded, practically, in

Chinese political struggles, Maoism “[aspired] to not only rewrite Western values and ideas, Marxism in particular, by way of integrating the universal principles of Marxism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, but also to create […] a vision of alternative modernity, by way of transforming Marxism into a non-European, henceforth

330 Cf. “Chairman Mao’s Theory of the Differentiation of Three Worlds Is a Major Contribution to Marxism-Leninism,” Peking Review 20, no. 45 (1977), p. 11. Mao’s ‘third way’ concept dating from the 1940s became his rearticulation of the Eurocentric ‘third world’ paradigm by the 1970s.

331 Liu, Kang. "Maoism: Revolutionary Globalism for the Third World Revisited." Comparative Literature Studies 52.1 (2015): 12-28, p. 13.

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more universal, vision of modernity.”332

Here, I would like to examine the conceptualization of Mao Zedong Thought as a

“more universal vision of modernity.” Since the phrase “alternative modernity” may imply a concept that is secondary or subordinate to the European vision, I will henceforth refer to Mao’s concept as a “rival modernity.” This concept was first formulated in the

1930s and 40s in response to the Japanese invasion of China, and the subsequent civil war between the CCP and the GMD (Nationalist Party), and envisioned a revolution and nation-building project quite distinct from Comintern-directed ideology.333 Mao’s rival modernity culminated in the launch of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966, which inspired radical revolutionary moments worldwide, including to a certain extent, May

’68. Maoism as transculturated Mao Zedong Thought thus engaged multiple temporalities: it was grounded in past Chinese political and military conflicts, deployed in present-day France and elsewhere as a solution to the contradictions of the contemporary world, and it opened up the possibility of a future world revolution. That future, in hindsight, dissipated with a series of pronounced failures: the end of the

Cultural Revolution, the end of May ‘68, and the end of the Cold War. Yet one could say that Maoism lives on today, as symbol, relevant theory and concrete practice in the form of Maoist militants in Nepal, India and elsewhere, in the continued relevance of Mao as a legitimizing symbol of revolution for the CCP, or in the purported resurgence of Maoism

332 Ibid.

333 When the Soviet-controlled Comintern fell in 1943 as a result of World War II, Mao took the opportunity to conceive of an autonomous communist revolutionary movement independent of the Soviet Union. 151

in China since the election of President .334 Insofar as one might speak of specters of Marx, we could say there exists a spectral Maoism as a particular form of

Marxism-Leninism. In an age of ever worsening disparities in wealth and income, both within and between nations of the “first” and “third” worlds, and unprecedented political, cultural, social and ecological instability, Mao’s challenges to the dominant world order and his attempts to transform global political relationships, however effective or ineffective, ephemeral or enduring we may consider them, have continued symbolic import.

In particular, Mao’s Theory of the Differentiation of Three Worlds offers a remapping of geopolitical space that to a certain extent still resonates today. Despite the replacement of First and Third World with new paradigms (notably, North-South), the category lingers in everyday speech, however uncritically. Appropriating the positivist paradigm of Three Worlds developed by European and American social scientists after

World War II, Mao proposed a reconfiguration to match the new world order of the Cold

War. In the original Eurocentric conception of the 1950s, the world was divided into a

334 If we take the celebrations in China marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution this past May to be any indication, the cult of Mao still carries weight. Ceremonies at Tiananmen Square began with a Cultural Revolution-era hymn extolling the importance of Mao Zedong Thought, Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman (⼤海航⾏靠舵⼿ Dàhǎi hángxíng kào duòshǒu). More extreme signs of the continuing relevance of the cult of Mao include a 50-kilo solid gold Mao statue unveiled at a Shenzhen art exhibit in 2013, and the demands of rural Maoists for an official People’s Day on December 26, Mao’s birthday. Cf. “Largest-ever Gold Mao Zedong Statue Unveiled in Shenzhen Worth 100 Billion Yuan.” Dec. 2013. China Broadcast Network. 最⼤⽑泽东⾦像亮相深圳 造价达 1 亿元: http://news.cnr.cn/native/pic/201312/t20131213_514395670.shtml; and Zhang Yu. “A sign of disaffection, rural worship of Chairman Mao is treated with caution.” Dec. 28, 2015, Global Times: globaltimes.cn/content/960962.shtml. See also Somini Sengupta, “Where Maoists Still Matter” in Magazine, Oct. 30, 2005; Edward Wong, “In China, a Place where Maoism Still Reigns,” NYT, June 24, 2011; Chris Buckley and Andrew Jacobs, “Maoists in China, Given New Life, Attack Dissent,” NYT, Jan. 4, 2015; and “40 Years After Death, Mao’s Mixed Legacy Looms Over China,” NYT, Sept. 9, 2016.

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first world of capitalism that was rational, democratic and free of religion and ideology, a second world of communism that was somewhat rational, technological and authoritarian, and a third world that was underdeveloped, irrational and religious. In other words, the first two worlds were “modern,” and the third world “traditional.” This modernization discourse was, in the words of Arif Dirlik, “informed by a historical teleology that placed the first world at the end of history,” serving to preserve Euro-American political and economic hegemony.335 Ironically, especially after the Bandung Conference of 1955, the concept was coopted by many “Third World” nations as a means of political mobilization in their national liberation struggles against Euro-American domination.

Mao’s Theory of Three Worlds was one of the most significant appropriations, turning the concept on its head to unite the poor, populous countries of the Third World against the technological and military dominance of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In a talk with Zambian President Kaunda during the latter’s state visit to the PRC in February

1974, Mao is reported to have stated, “In my view, the United States and the Soviet

Union form the first world. Japan, Europe and Canada, the middle section, belong to the second world. We are the third world […] With the exception of Japan, Asia belongs to the third world. The whole of Africa belongs to the third world, and Latin America too.”336 Mao’s reorganization of global relationships designated Asian, Latin American and African “Third World” countries as “the revolutionary driving forces of world history,” and Second World countries such as France as potential allies that “could be

335 "Spectres of the Third World: Global Modernity and the End of the Three Worlds." Third World Quarterly Vol. 25.No.1 (2004): 131-48, p. 134.

336 “Chairman Mao’s Theory of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds is a Major Contribution to Marxism-Leninism” by the Editiorial Department of Renmin Bao. Peking Review, No. 45. November 4, 1977. 153

tapped by revolutionary forces ... in a new global united front against the [First World] superpowers.”337 In Mao’s conception, the geographical “Third World” rather than the

First World represented the “end of history,” the pinnacle of progress and modernity.

Although Mao’s Theory of Three Worlds was not officially articulated until the early seventies, its precursor, Mao’s idea of a “third way” between U.S. capitalism and

Soviet social-imperialism, resonated with French radicals in search of alternatives to

Soviet socialism and played directly into CCP strategies for the dissemination of Mao

Zedong Thought. At the height of French Maoism, support for “third world” revolution and tiers-mondisme converged with Maoism’s anti-colonial and anti-imperialist call to arms.338 Mao’s “sinicized” Marxism-Leninism emphasized the central role of peasants in the revolution, the “” to be achieved by , and continuous cultural, or ideological revolution to be fought mainly through cultural “weapons” such as literature, film and popular art. In his famous “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on

Literature and Art,” Mao declared that literature and art in China should “become a part of the entire revolutionary machine, functioning as a powerful weapon for uniting and educating the people, and beating and destroying the enemies, and helping the people whole-heartedly fight against their enemy.”339 By the time Mao launched the Cultural

Revolution to combat what he saw as revisionist elements within the Party that could curtail the revolution, the CCP had already established a vast propaganda strategy, translating Mao’s works into hundreds of languages, and disseminating them through

337 Liu Kang, p. 20.

338 Thus the popularity of such phrases as “Political struggle grows out of the barrel of a gun” (1938), and “War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions” (1936). Cited in J. Bourg, p. 474.

339 Selected Works, vol 3, 2nd ed., 848, cited in Wang Ning. 154

links with radical booksellers and institutions worldwide in “Third World” countries as well as in potentially China-friendly “Second World” countries such as France.

Naming culture explicitly as a site of contestation, Mao aimed to transform minds as a necessary first step to achieving world revolution. To that end, in the midst of the

Cold War, several publications detailing the achievements and programs of the PRC, translations of Chinese literature, Mao’s Selected Works, and perhaps, most notably, the condensed version of Mao’s collected essays, Quotations from Chairman Mao, or the

Little Red Book, were exported worldwide as cultural weapons. In ’s preface to the Quotations, the book is described as a “spiritual atom bomb” to combat the actual bombs amassed by the U.S. and Soviet Union. According to Alexander Cook, this

“weapon of mass instruction, the intercontinental delivery system for a potentially world- shattering ideological payload,” perhaps more than any other text, embodied Mao Zedong

Thought in its most potent and universal form.340 In the next section, I explore how

China’s translation strategies and transnational distribution networks in general, and the

Little Red Book in particular, turned Mao Zedong Thought into a global language, a kind of Esperanto of revolution.

340 See Alexander C. Cook, "Mao's Little Red Book: The Spiritual Atom Bomb and Its Global Fallout." Scripting Revolution. Ed. Baker, Keith Michael and Dan Edelstein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 251-66, p. 252.

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The Transculturation of the Cult of Mao: Global Networks, Crossings,

Translated Forms

While most accounts of French Maoism take it to be a uniquely French construction, imagined, molded, and disseminated in France by French intellectuals, I would like to elaborate on the popularization of Maoism as shaped by Mao himself – and the key role played by translation – between the founding of the People’s Republic of

China in 1949 and Mao’s death in 1976 both within China and worldwide. For Maoism was not simply a construct of Western radicalism, it was also shaped significantly by

Chinese efforts to further world revolution and facilitated by the transnational collaboration of foreign experts and militant bookstores worldwide. I will start with a general overview of this strategy, then examine a particular instance of translation, the

Little Red Book, as an example of the creation of a “common and universal currency of revolution.” 341 I will further examine its subsequent appropriation by a number of French

Maoists in the elaboration of their theory and practice.

As a number of scholars have shown, from 1949 onwards, the PRC fully recognized the importance of translation and created a large-scale, systematic cultural diplomacy and educational exchange program to promote New China globally.342 This

341 Lanjun Xu. "Translation and Internationalism." Mao's Little Red Book: A Global History. Ed. Cook, Alexander C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 76-95, p. 76.

342 In addition to Lanjun Xu’s excellent chapter (see footnote above), there are several significant Chinese studies including Dai Yannian and Chen Rinong, eds. Zhongguo waiwenju wushinian: dashiji [Fifty years of the Chinese Foreign Languages Bureau: memorabilia] Beijing: Xinxing chubanshe, 1999; Cheng Yinghong, “Xiang shijie shuchu geming: wege zai Yafeilayingxiang de chutan” [Exporting the revolution to the world: A preliminary study on the influence of the Cultural Revolution on Asia, Africa and Latin 156

strategy included the crafting of an internationalist socialist identity with other socialist states,343 the framing of China as a Third World leader and friend to oppressed nations, and the positioning of Chinese socialism as an alternative to the hegemonic world systems represented by the United States and the Soviet Union. Activities supporting these objectives were organized and implemented by the Foreign Languages Press and the International Bookstore344, and were greatly intensified during the Sino-Soviet split.

By 1962, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the China Cultural Council explicitly announced that the primary goal of distributing Chinese texts abroad was to “accelerate world revolution,”345 and Zhou Enlai, at the Eighth Plenum of the CCP Central

Committee, declared that “the center of world revolution had moved from Moscow to

Beijing.”346 With the aim of “creating a global language of Maoist revolution,” the PRC subsidized the translation and distribution of numerous foreign-language publications

America] in Mao zhuyi yu shijiegeming [Maoism and World Revolution]. Hong Kong: Tianyuanshuwu, 2009.

343 For more about China’s strategic positioning in an international socialist community, see Nicolai Volland. "Translating the : Cultural Exchange, National Identity, and the Socialist World in the Early PRC." Twentieth Century China 33.2 (April 2008): 51-72.

344 The Chinese Foreign Languages Press (FLP) and International Bookstore were both established in 1949, shortly after the founding of the PRC. Originally part of the International News Bureau (Guoiji xinwen ju), the Foreign Languages Press was renamed the FLP and reorganized under the Publicity Department of the CCP in 1952 with the stated aim of promoting New China’s policies and theories, and newsworthy achievements, as well as disseminating works of propaganda globally. The International Bookstore on the other hand was conceived officially as a trade organization (rather than a propaganda institution), which to a certain degree, facilitated its relationship with capitalist countries such as France and Japan. Nevertheless, by the sixties, the official missives of the International Bookstore became more and more overtly revolutionary. For more details, see Lanjun Xu (cited above).

345 Cao Jinfei, ed. Zhongguo guoji tushu maoyi zonggongsi sishizhounian: shilunji [The fortieth anniversary of the China International Publishing Company: Selected papers on its history]. Beijing: China International Publishing Group, 2009. Cited in Lanjun Xu, p. 83.

346 Ibid., p. 85-86.

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through the Foreign Languages Press and the International Bookstore, including the introduction of foreign socialist (mostly Soviet) works into Chinese, and the export of translated Chinese literature (i.e., literary classics, May Fourth literature, contemporary socialist realist works) and political texts (with a focus on Mao’s writings347) worldwide

– primarily to “in-between regions,” a broad swathe of countries situated economically and politically between the United States and the Soviet Union. These “smaller” powers included socialist and developing countries fighting against imperialism and colonialism, as well as capitalist countries that were friendly to China, anti-imperialist and anti-war – in effect, countries that shared certain interests with China, notably the desire to be more independent from the two superpowers. Although overseen by the Chinese government, both the Foreign Languages Press and the International Bookstore were truly transnational collaborations involving numerous foreign experts, translators and communist bookstores worldwide. An internal FLP record, for example, documents that

“between 1956 and 1967, the Foreign Languages Press plans to create forty-two positions for foreign experts (including eleven nationalities).”348 These foreign experts based in

China included returning overseas Chinese, translators and experts from both capitalist and socialist countries, and short-term foreign translators hired for specific projects. In some cases, such as in Eastern Europe, translations were undertaken by local embassies; although these books were translated locally, they were still published through the

Foreign Languages Press. Through progressive overseas organizations affiliated with the

International Bookstore, some translations (notably the Selected Works of Mao Zedong

347 According to Lanjun Xu, by 1961, Mao’s works made up 70 percent of all exported texts.

348 Dai and Chen, eds. Zhongguo waiwenju wushinian: dashiji, p. 62. Cited in Lanjun Xu, p. 82. 158

and Quotations from Chairman Mao) were undertaken locally by foreign agents – sometimes at the request or with the sanction of the PRC, at times without the PRC’s knowledge. Thus, while the International Bookstore was primarily the distribution arm of the PRC’s publicity machine, it occasionally sanctioned local translations.

The International Bookstore’s extensive global network encompassed 545 stores in 87 countries by 1963, including numerous radical bookshops in France, many of which were founded in the sixties and seventies.349 In effect, the sixties were the “golden age” of militant bookstores in France, and Maoist shops like Le Phénix, Norman Bethune, Gît- le-coeur, La Commune, Les Herbes Sauvages, La dialectique sans peine, and perhaps most famously, Maspero’s Joie de lire in the Latin Quarter served as gathering places for

French leftists and anticolonial activists – and were often the site of reprisals and attacks by reactionary groups such as Occident.350 The four-volume Selected Writings of Mao

Tse-Tung appeared in French bookstores between 1962 and 1968; Pékin Information, the

French version of Peking Review, first appeared in 1963; and the French translation of Le

Petit livre rouge came out in 1966. In addition to these translated works undertaken by the Foreign Languages Press and exported by the International Bookstore, leftist bookshops also carried many pro-Chinese French journals such as L’Humanité nouvelle,

Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, Révolution, and La Cause du peuple.

Along with the Foreign Languages Press and the International Bookstore, Radio

Beijing, China’s Central Broadcasting Station (Zhongyang renmin guangbo diantai)

349 See Cao, ed. Zhongguo guoji tushu maoyi zonggongsi sishizhounian.

350 See Julien Hage, “L’âge d’or des librairies militantes (1945-1981)” in Patricia Sorel, Frédérique Leblanc, Histoire de la librairie française, 2008, p. 321-331.

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served as an important vehicle for the global diffusion and promotion of Mao Zedong

Thought. Arguably even more effective in the transmission of Mao’s ideas than its extensive bookstore networks, Radio Beijing was broadcast in over 27 languages in more than 135 countries.351 Radio Pékin, its French branch, began diffusing programs based on

Mao Zedong Thought such as “Quotations from Chairman Mao: On Imperialism and All

Reactionaries are Paper Tigers,” “All the People of the World Love Chairman Mao,” and

“China in the Eyes of Foreign Friends” after the launch of the Cultural Revolution in

1966. To a certain extent, the print and broadcast activities of the Foreign Languages

Press, the International Bookstore and Radio Pékin testify to China’s considerable “soft power” tactics during the Cold War period. Economically strapped by its external expenditures and military involvement in Vietnam and Korea, and internally by the

Cultural Revolution, China sent little in the way of money or arms to its “Third World” and “in-between” allies during the 1960s. Rather it depended on translation as an important strategy in realizing an internationalist socialist solidarity in “in-between” regions, particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also among China sympathizers in France.

The global success of the cult of Mao is exemplified by the distribution of the

Quotations of Chairman Mao, at one time one of the most translated and circulated books in history; between 1966 and 1969, its official circulation was second only to the Holy

351 Radio Beijing was established in December 1949 to spread New China news and Maoist theory and practice to surrounding Asian countries and overseas Chinese. By 1956, it had expanded to four departments encompassing Asian, European, Soviet and Overseas Chinese regions. With the launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Radio Beijing canceled most of its news programs and focused on promoting Mao’s works; notably Quotations from Chairman Mao made perfect sound bytes for global diffusion. Zhongguo guoji guangbo dianti zhi (The Radio International). Beijing: Zhongyang guoji guangbo chubanshe, 2001, vol. I. Cited in Lanjun Xun.

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Bible, even excluding the countless local and foreign editions and unauthorized mimeographed and handwritten copies.352 Originally produced as a portable domestic military training manual in 1964, by 1971, it had been translated into 36 languages and published about 110 million times abroad. 353 During the first three years of the Cultural

Revolution (1966-1969), over a billion official volumes were issued. The first edition printed on May 16, 1964 was classified as “internal” army reading, and sized to fit into the pockets of military uniforms. A second edition printed to commemorate the 38th anniversary of the founding of the PLA in 1965 became the standard “army volume.”

Further reduced in size and clad in red vinyl, the Little Red Book was often sold out and difficult to acquire by the general public. At one point, the State Council’s Foreign

Affairs Department issued a recall of all foreign copies of the book because it did not represent a complete collection of Mao Zedong Thought and was meant solely for internal use. The clandestine nature of its initial publication, and the difficulties associated with obtaining a copy greatly heightened demand, turning the book into a veritable cult object.

Containing 427 extracts from Mao’s speeches and texts written between 1929 and

1964, the standard army volume is arranged into 33 thematic chapters (on the people’s war, education, art, etc.). Stylistically, the book is a blend of two genres, the Analects of

Confucius and a modern ideological primer. As a collection of excerpts from Mao’s complete Selected Works, the more accessible Quotations empowered ordinary Chinese

352 For a riveting book history, see Daniel Leese’s "The Little Red Book" in Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China's Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 108-27.

353 Ibid.

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citizens with the ability to recognize when cadres deviated from Maoist doctrine. As decontextualized sound bytes, they were also specially suited to appropriation by radicals advancing various leftist agendas. Appearing in French bookstores in 1966/1967, Le Petit livre rouge quickly became a symbol of revolutionary struggle, encapsulated in the pop song, “Mao Mao,” performed by Claude Channes in La Chinoise: “C’est le petit livre rouge/qui fait que tout enfin bouge.” While French Maoists were exposed to and engaged with Mao’s texts as early as the 1950s, I would like to focus on Le Petit livre rouge and

Mao’s Selected Works, which did not become available in France until the mid-sixties.354

As a symbol of the Cultural Revolution, Le Petit livre rouge in particular was mobilized in varied ways by diverse groups leading up to and immediately following May ’68.

Emblazoned on posters at the Sorbonne, Mao slogans like “Une étincelle peut mettre le feu à toute la plaine”355 and images of Mao were ubiquitous during the revolts of May

’68.

Mao Zedong Thought proved especially provocative and attractive to French

Marxists because of its reconciliation of theory and practice. Theoretically, it offered a scientific method – dialectical – for understanding the contradictions of the modern world. Practically, it offered a number of strategies for changing the world for the better in line with its theory. In particular, French Maoists were drawn to two tactics: armed struggle mainly via street protests, and clashes with the police and right-wing

354 Althusser for example cited Mao as early as 1957. See Elliot, Althusser, p. 28. Noted in Bourg, “The Red Guards,” p. 480. Many French radicals, as noted earlier, first accessed Mao’s texts in Arab or African countries. Benny Lévy/Pierre Victor as head of the GP noted in a 1971 interview that Althusser’s Marxist students at ENS were studying Mao’s complete Selected Works published by the PCF imprint Éditions sociales. The interview is available in English at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/levy- benny/1971/investigation.htm

355 From a letter written by Mao dated January 5, 1930 to address signs of pessimism within the CCP. 162

groups (e.g., Comités Vietnam de base), and learning from the masses via what would become known as the “enquête” and the “établissement” (in factories like Renault-Flins and Peugeot-Sochaux). In addition to philosophy and politics, the convergence of Maoist theory and practice can be seen in a number of artistic projects, from the silk-screen posters produced by various artist collectives during May ’68 to Godard’s projects with the Dziga Vertov Group to Situationist experiments with cinéma détourné.

As an example of a translated text that reworks Maoist theories and practices,

René Viénet’s underground film, La Dialectique peut-elle casser les briques? (1973) merits closer inspection. Produced at a moment when many leftist intellectuals were repudiating their radicalism, and some among the Far Left were considering a “Common

Program” with the Communist and Socialist parties to win future elections, the film represents a remarkable attempt to subvert the assimilation of radical ideologies into hegemonic power structures. Viénet’s group took an existing Hong Kong kung fu film –

Tu Guangqi’s Crush (a.k.a. Crush Karate, 1972) – removed the soundtrack, and substituted French voice-over commentaries and subtitles to create a new story out of the old. Announcing itself as “le premier film entièrement détourné de l’histoire du cinéma,”356 La Dialectique stages an allegory of class struggle between ‘proletarians’ and

‘bureaucrats.’ At the same time, it transgresses capitalist modes of production through a

Situationist tactic called détournement. First articulated by and Gil Wolman

356 La dialectique was actually not the first such film in history. Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), which dubbed over a Japanese spy film, preceded it by several years.

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in their 1956 article, “Modes d’emploi du détournement”, this surrealist-inspired technique engages in a form of politically charged, creative piracy.357

In French, détournement encompasses detour, deviation, deflection, misappropriation (détournement de fonds), and more violently, hijacking (détournement d’avion). The most common English translation, “diversion,” misses many of these meanings, but when translated back into French, adds an element of divertissement – or fun, amusing, light entertainment. La Dialectique captures all of these significations to a certain extent: It “highjacks” a Chinese text from Hong Kong, and reterritorializes it in

Paris in French. It transgresses the normal modes of production, pirating an existing , revamping its content, and renouncing profit and the dominant system of . It is playfully self-mocking, parodying reactionary bureaucrats and radical leftist in-fighting alike. The imposed narration of a revolutionary insurrection coincides with images of unarmed peasants and workers fighting against sword-wielding officials who go door to door bullying and harassing local men and women.

Since the original soundtrack has been removed, the viewer is forced to speculate on the location, period, and plot of the original film. Based on costumes and other visual clues, I would infer that the original story centered on an anti-colonial revolt in Korea against Japanese occupation. The Situationist film turns the Japanese-Korean conflict into a class struggle between tae-kwon-do practicing “proletarians” and armed “bureaucrats.”

The film’s protagonist, Pai Piau, who is a master of both martial arts and , upon visiting his old tae-kwon-do school (the headquarters of a diverse

357 Guy Debord, Gil J. Wolman, “Methods of Détournement” in Ken Knabb, ed. and trans. The Situationalist International Anthology, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. First published in Les Lèvres nues, no. 8 (May 1956).

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leftist camp encompassing Situationists, Trotskyists, Marxists, and anarchists), finds that it has been infiltrated by state bureaucrats and bourgeois capitalists who have convinced some leftists to quit the school and join the state. Pai Piau, with his advanced dialectics – he has read diverse radical philosophies from Marx to Reich, and all the books published by Champ Libre – unites the remaining revolutionaries in a series of street battles that culminate in a showdown between Pai Piau and the leading bureaucrat, a battle “à armes inégales” pitting “la Dialectique contre le Pouvoir.” While the proletarians win the fight, it is clear that the struggle is not over; the narrator contends that, after all, “détourner un film ne suffit plus.” In light of the fact that the Situationist International disbanded in

1972, shortly before the release of the film, this ending suggests Viénet’s awareness of the limitations of dialectical materialism, and the need for revolutionary theory and practice to constantly evolve to meet new situations. In the case of France in the mid-

1970s, the new situation meant the disavowal of May ’68 by the Nouveaux Philosophes, the incorporation of previously radical intellectuals and activists into the bureaucratic power structure, and even, a few years later, the assimilation of radical practices like détournement into profitable ventures.358

Yet, on another level, the choice of Tu Guangqi’s film implies a certain, perhaps unintended poetic justice. Tu fled to Hong Kong from Shanghai after World War II, and began making nationalist Mandarin-language films for the Asia Film Company, which was established in 1953 with American money. As Meaghan Morris points out, Tu was a

358 As an example of détournement detourned for capitalist purposes, Edward Ball cites the popularity of le rétro in France – the “dusting off and rehabilitation of dead texts, dead commodities, dead forms in design, dead lifestyles” and their reinvention as “neorealism,” “neoart deco,” “neo-1960s” and so on. See "The Great Sideshow of the Situationist International." Yale French Studies No. 73.Everyday Life (1987): 21-37, p. 36.

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right-winger who “helped remake and reinterpret — indeed, détourner — successful left- wing dramas and themes from a right-wing nationalist perspective.”359 Whether or not

Viénet was conscious of this biographical detail, La Dialectique’s techniques of displacement and distanciation challenge the tired notion of translation as fidelity; by referring to itself as a text détourné, it points to the décalage between voice-over and visual image, original and translated text, the author’s intentions, and the text’s unintended, surplus meanings.

Conclusion: From Revolution to Ethics?

In the aftermath of May ’68 and the Cultural Revolution, emancipatory mass initiatives such as French worker-student collectives and the Shanghai Commune were dissolved, central state power restored, and revolution largely rejected as a means of political reinvention. Both events were deemed disastrous “failures,” most damnably by those who had participated in the events themselves. In effect, a major consequence of

May ’68 was the “exorcism” of revolution from leftist vocabulary, and, to a certain extent, the dissolution of radical Left politics altogether.360 One interpretation of the immediate post-May situation in France posits that “the dominant intellectual sense of the period was the massive reaction against all forms of centrally organized political authority – whether in the form of the self-proclaimed Revolutionary party or the

359 Morris, Meaghan. "Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema: Hong Kong and the Making of a Global Popular Culture." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5. No. 2 (2004), p. 182.

360 Khilnani, Sunil. Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.

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Bourgeois state,”361 that is, the dissent was anti-hierarchical in nature. But given France’s strong centralizing political traditions, the critique of the state was primarily projected elsewhere – specifically onto the 1917 Soviet Revolution and its legacy, which quickly became indissociable from totalitarianism, especially after the publication of

Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in 1974. In an intellectual (perhaps more appropriately ideological) move linking revolution and totalitarianism, several former

Maoists such as Bernard Henri-Lévy, Pascal Bruckner and André Glucksmann drew a direct line of continuity between Stalin’s labor camps and Jacobin Terror. By drawing upon the thought of Arendt and Popper362, criticizing “old masters” such as Sartre and

Nietzsche, and renouncing their own Maoism as naïve and misguided, the self- proclaimed New Philosophers published and spoke frequently in various news outlets, becoming the media’s go-to representatives of the May generation. What they may have lacked in coherence or rigor, they have made up for in notoriety as their anti-totalitarian and anti-Soviet discourse came to dominate post-May accounts of the event’s legacy.

The decisive delegitimization of revolution in France is most often attributed to historians like François Furet, whose conceptually more rigorous Penser la révolution française (1978) cemented the historical link between revolution and totalitarianism.

Furet’s revisionist history places the French Revolution at the origin of both liberal democracy and terror and totalitarianism, contending that the former was undermined by the latter. Another popular scholarly interpretation asserts that the revolutionary projects

361 Khilnani, p. 122.

362 Ibid.

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of the 1960s did not simply degenerate into totalitarianism but sowed the seeds for an emergent activist civil society. For instance, Bourg and Wolin claim that the GP’s (and by extension, French Maoism’s) most important contribution lies in its civil rights legacy.

The GP’s associations with a variety of emerging grassroots groups fighting for immigrant, worker, environmental and prisoners rights were important precursors to various rights movements in later decades, including the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes. Remi Hess attributes the origins of the women’s and gay rights movements (what became the Mouvement de libération des femmes and the Front homosexuel d’action révolutionaire) to the experience of the short-lived Maoist group, Vive la Révolution, whose rejection of bourgeois society was based on Henri Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life.363

Elsewhere, Bourg has suggested that 1968 was a pivotal moment in the transformation of an old revolutionary script.364 It was a moment when revolution itself mutated, as he argues, into reform-oriented antinomian democratic movements; it was a turn “from revolution to ethics.”365 From its Marxist goal of eliminating bourgeois class power, revolution became more narrowly focused on the struggles of particular groups and interests. It was a moment when the convergence of revolutionary traditions and what

363 See Remi Hess. Les Maoïstes Français. Paris: Anthropos, 1974, p. 151. See also Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch. New York: Harper Row, 1971. Cited in Fields, “French Maoism,” p. 155.

364 See Bourg’s chapter,“Writing on the Wall: 1968 as Event and Representation” in Keith M. Baker and Dan Edelstein’s Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

365 Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 in Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007.

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Bourg terms a “radicalism without revolution” would lead to new types of “non- revolutionary contestatory social action.”366 In some ways, the redemptive narratives of

Maoism and May ’68 dovetail with the critique of revolution as totalitarianism. But to frame the legacy of the sixties as a turn from revolution to ethics, or as a shift from revolution to rights implies a false dichotomy between revolution and rights that obscures their common origin, and reinforces the dominant account of May as a misguided cultural revolt of youth. In this narrative, mistakes of youth are redeemed by a humanitarian attention to various civil and human rights. This redemption narrative is perhaps most strikingly exemplified by Bernard Kouchner, ex-gauchiste, founder of Médecins sans frontières and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs under Sarkozy. As Kristin Ross has cogently argued, many former leftist radicals who are today high-ranking officials and high-profile intellectuals had to give May some credibility in order to establish their own moral credentials.367 Thus their portrayal of May is predominantly that of a youth revolt or cultural revolution gone awry – but one that was not without some positive legacy on the present: it nurtured the women's, anti- and gay rights movements, and feeds seamlessly into the current neoliberal climate privileging individualism and human rights.

More significantly, this critical/redemptive narrative also obscures the paradoxical origin of human rights identified by Lynn Hunt: the concept of human rights effectively

366 Ibid, p. 303.

367 May ’68 and Its Afterlives.

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shares the same origin as totalitarianism – revolution.368 Hunt traces the development of rights outlined in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen into human rights as a series of discontinuities and breaks, importantly arguing that while human rights are imagined to be universal and to transcend history, they are historically contingent and grounded in specific times and places.369 By divorcing revolution from its originary link to rights, the critical/redemptive narratives that surfaced in the wake of

May obscured these discontinuities and contributed to the displacement of political visions of a more just government to a wholly new concept of human rights focused on state abuses of the rights of individual human subjects. Thus while I concur with Bourg that a resignification of revolution occurred after 1968, I contend that the important epistemological and ideological shift is not from revolution to ethics but rather the disassociation of revolution and ethics – a disassociation that subsequently enabled the devaluation of revolution from its sacred place in the identity of the French Republic to its being seen as devoid of possibility, and leading inevitably to tyranny, violence and terror, to the exact opposite of its emancipatory ideals.

It should be noted that 1968 is not the first time French writers and reactionaries who perceived of revolution as a threat to order took its miscarriage as an opportunity to write it off. As Dominica Chang maintains, after 1848, the romantic view of revolution as

“imbued with [the] messianic promise” of “a new, more socially just world order” gave

368 "The Paradoxical Origin of Human Rights." Human Rights and Revolutions. Ed. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, Marilyn B. Young. Lanham, MD Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

369 For an original perspective on the historical contingency of human rights, see Lydia Liu’s analysis of the translingual making of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948." Critical Inquiry 40 (Summer 2014): 385-417.

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way to a discourse of revolution as dangerous, absurd, a “tragicomedy” and a “failure,” eventually paving the way for “the acceptance of a republic gained through parliamentary politics.”370 What is unique to the desacralization of revolution in the late twentieth century is precisely the separation of revolution from its moral and philosophical foundation in Enlightenment notions of natural rights. In effect, the delegitimization of revolution converged with a number of attacks on Enlightenment thought, most influentially Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Though originally published in 1947 as a critique of Hitler’s National Socialism and the Nazi horrors that had led to their exile, the book did not gain traction until the 1970s. Adorno and

Horkheimer’s argument that “Enlightenment is totalitarian” because it turned reason into fascist repression and irrational domination later inspired a multitude of studies critical of

Enlightenment philosophies, including that of Dorinda Outram, who attributes the totalitarian nature of the French Revolution to Enlightenment rationalism and universalism.371 The rejection of revolution and Enlightenment led in part to a moral transcendence of politics that culminated in a championing of human rights as a new internationalism, what Samuel Moyn has termed “the last utopia.” Moyn argues that human rights “survived as a moral utopia when political utopias died,” effectively

370 “Reading and Repeating the Revolutionary Script: Revolutionary Mimicry in Nineteenth-Century France” in Scripting Revolution, p. 198.

371 See Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Outram argues, “The history of Revolutionary bodies is the history of a self-image of rationality, reflexivity, universalism, autonomy, individuation and emancipation always containing the potential for transposition into its direct opposite” – that is, as Lynn Hunt puts it, “the massacre and dismemberment, even the extermination, of all non-normal groups (women, Jews, homosexuals, or the poor).” Cited in Lynn Hunt, "The Paradoxical Origin of Human Rights," p. 4-5.

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displacing other international visions – such as socialism, communism, Maoism, pan-

Africanism, etc. – for a better world.372

To a certain extent, though in quite different ways, the desacralization of revolution can be observed in post-Mao China as well. After the death of Mao in 1976, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was denounced by the CCP as “ten years of chaos.” Under the new leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the party released an official statement declaring the Cultural Revolution to have been “responsible for the most severe setback and heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the State and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”373 Although “initiated and led by Comrade Mao

Zedong,” the Revolution’s excesses were attributed to over-reaching “counter- revolutionary” officials – the disgraced general Lin Biao and the , led by

Mao’s wife, and comprised of her associates, , and Wang Hongwen.374 By shifting the bulk of the blame to Lin Biao and the Gang of

Four, this narrative allowed Maoist policies room for error while upholding the overall correctness of Maoist principles, thereby affirming the legitimacy and legacy of the

Chinese state. Under the new CCP policy of gaige kaifang (reform and opening up),

372 Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

373 From the CCP’s “Resolution on Historical Questions of the Party.” Cited in MacFarquhar, Roderick "The Last Red Bastion." India International Centre Quarterly 36.No. 3/4 (Winter 2009 Spring 2010): 224- 33, p.225.

374 In 1981, the four ousted leaders were convicted in a public trial of anti-party activities and public crimes, including usurpation of state power and party leadership, and the persecution of some 750,000 people, nearly 35,000 of whom died between 1966 and 1976. Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao both received death sentences that were later commuted to life sentences, while Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan were sentenced to life and twenty years in prison, respectively. Cf. MacFarquhar, Roderick and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution.

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revolution was discreetly replaced by reform in political slogans like “building socialism with Chinese characteristics.” This new Chinese socialism under Deng emphasized economic productivity and modernization rather than building a socialist utopia.

As in France, a changed political landscape converged with a concomitant shift in historical evaluations to bid “farewell to revolution” (gaobie geming). This shift would occur in China not in the late seventies after the recognized “failure” of the Cultural

Revolution but in the early nineties following another failed mass revolt – the 1989 events at Tiananmen Square.375 One of the first to criticize “that holy word, revolution,”

Liu Xiaobo, a central figure in the June Fourth protests, claimed that the sense of sacred righteousness attached to the term revolution drove the Chinese people to idolize self- sacrifice and martyrdom while masking the fact that democracy never existed under

Communist rule.376 In his reflection on why the 1989 democracy movement failed, he points to CCP use of revolution to justify party authoritarianism, asserting that in post-

1949 China, revolution implied “justice, correctness, kindness, virtue, good fortune, and holiness. It has also implied supreme authority.”377 Liu Xiaobo’s view was reiterated and extended in Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu’s influential book, Gaobie geming: Huiwang

Ershishiji Zhongguo (Farewell to Revolution: Looking Back Upon Twentieth-Century

China). Without conflating revolution and totalitarianism as did the New Philosophers

375 Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming: Huiwang Ershishiji Zhongguo (Farewell to Revolution: Looking Back Upon China of the Twentieth Century), Hong Kong: Tiandi, 1995.

376 Liu Xiabo, “That Holy Word, Revolution” in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, 2nd Ed. eds. Elizabeth J. Perry, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. First edition published 1992.

377 Ibid, p. 310.

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and revisionist historians of the French Revolution post-May, Chinese intellectuals such as Liu Xiabo, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu called for the replacement of revolutionary understandings of history and philosophy with a less radical approach to studying the historico-philosophical problems of modern China. As Rebecca Karl notes, this “farewell to revolution” signaled not only “a condemnation of twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals and political history for its supposed fetishizing of revolutionary solutions to crises,” but also called for scholars “to completely de-radicalize thought, practice and political social ambition.”378

This deradicalization of history, philosophy and politics led to what terms in The Politics of Imagining Asia and elsewhere, a depoliticization, that is, “a process in which state mechanisms have gradually appropriated active subjectivity or subjective agency within ‘state rationality’ in track with the global market.”379 In other words, late twentieth-century China abandoned revolutionary paradigms in favor of a modernization track in line with a neoliberal global capitalism that encourages the commodification of subjects as human capital. As China underwent modernization reforms and ‘opened up,’ many survivors of the Cultural Revolution began writing memoirs of their experiences, leading to the emergence of what became known as scar literature in China, while writers who immigrated abroad began to recount their Mao-era experiences for foreign readerships. In the next chapter, I will examine how bicultural

Sino-French authors translate the Cultural Revolution for Francophone audiences in a

378 Foreword to the English edition of Wang Hui’s The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity. London: Verso, 2009, vii. Cited in Tze-ki Hon, The Allure of the Nation: The Cultural and Historical Debates in Late Qing and Republican China. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. p. 4.

379 Wang, Hui. The Politics of Imagining Asia. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 41. 174

post-socialist climate, both confirming and contradicting dominant discourses about

China and the GPCR – and contributing to the erasure of events like the Cultural

Revolution and May ’68 as innovative reimaginings of political possibilities.

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CHAPTER FOUR:

Revolution in Retrospect: The Francophone Cultural Revolution Novel

Since the late 1980s, a growing number of Chinese writers have been writing and publishing in French to some acclaim, culminating in the appointment of François Cheng to the Académie Française in 2002. The commercial popularity of the “roman franco- chinois,”380 not only in France but also internationally, has led to growing critical interest, further valorizing the status of these transnational works. A good percentage of these

Chinese Francophone writings include semi-autobiographical tales of the Chinese

Cultural Revolution, and in particular, its reeducation campaign. Written in French and published primarily in Paris for a Francophone audience, these novels unsurprisingly tend to focus on France and French literature. What is surprising, however, is the absence of revolution, and indeed of any notion of revolutionary politics, in these novels that are ostensibly about the lived experience of revolution.

Novels like Dai Sijie’s best-selling Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (2000),

François Cheng’s Le Dit de Tianyi (1998), and Wei-Wei’s Une Fille Zhuang (2006) recount individual hardships suffered during the Cultural Revolution while constructing an image of the French Republic as a privileged site of individual freedom and creative liberty. These semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age tales portray young men and women who were sent to the countryside to be reeducated by peasant laborers, but whose true reeducation occurs through the illicit reading of French literature. French, as the language

380 Muriel Détrie. “Y-a-t-il un roman franco-chinois?” Magazine littéraire, n°429, mars 2004, p. 65-66.

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of self-liberation, is associated with Enlightenment ideals and human rights, as well as with a certain idea of France as a world literary capital. This romantic image has been criticized for its one-dimensional nature, and unabashed marketing appeal to a French audience.381 For Andrew Watts, the exotic idealization of France flatters French readers while at the same time criticizing ideological oppression in China.382 For other scholars like Michelle Bloom, France is not necessarily privileged as superior in these texts; rather the cultural interplay of “East” and “West” culminates in a form of cultural hybridity.383

Taking another approach, Yvonne Hsieh suggests that Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise should be read as a warning against misreading literature in general, and Dai

Sijie’s text in particular, rather than as a representation of either French or Chinese culture.384

While these studies provide insights into the ambiguous nature of intercultural exchange, it is inaccurate to claim that their emphasis on French culture merely reflects

France’s opinion of its own cultural status, and/or serves to enhance the books’ marketing appeal to a French audience. In some instances, the books’ promotional blurbs and

381 Cf. McCall, Ian. "French Literature and Film in the USSR and Mao's China: Intertexts in Makine's Au Temps Du Fleuve and Dai Sijie's Balzac et La Petite Tailleuse Chinoise." Romance Studies Vol. 24 No. 2 (July 2006): 159-70; Silvester, Rosalind. "Genre and Image in Francophone Chinese Works." Contemporary French and Francophone Studies Vol. 10.No. 4 (December 2006): 367-75; Allen, Brooke. "A Suitcase Education." New York Times Book Review 16 September 2001; and Winterton, Bradley. "A Picturesque Look at China’s Cultural Revolution." Taipei Times 21 October 2001.

382 Watts, Andrew. "Mao’s China in the Mirror: Reversing the Exotic in Dai Sijie’s Balzac et La Petite Tailleuse Chinoise." Romance Studies Vol. 29.No. 1 (Jan. 2011).

383 Bloom, Michelle. “Contemporary Franco-Chinese Cinema: Translation, Citation and Imitation in Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There?" Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22.4 (2006): 311-25.

384 Hsieh, Yvonne. “Splendeurs et misères des mots: Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise de Dai Sijie,” Etudes francophones, XVII.1: 93–105. 177

publisher reviews conflict with their actual content. The fact that many of these works have been translated into numerous languages, including Chinese, and have proven to be popular worldwide, further suggests a global consumer appeal that cannot be reduced to

French audience expectations. Another issue is that these studies tend to focus on a single novel by Dai Sijie, limiting potential insights into broader questions about the relationship between the literary imagination and historical consciousness. Most significant, however, by focusing on cultural hybridity, exoticism, or a critique of

Chinese political repression, they seem to miss the question of what a portrait of hybridity or exoticism or CCP political repression in our contemporary transnational age might reveal about how popular culture both reflects and shapes dominant ideologies.

Below, I extend the scope of study to include a larger corpus, and focus on the act of translation and the role of the bicultural translator as a recurring theme in several novels to draw out what gets lost or displaced in translating the Cultural Revolution to

Western, and in particular, French audiences, and why. It should be noted that the corpus selected in this chapter does not encompass all Francophone works depicting the Cultural

Revolution. Rather, they were chosen based on three criteria: 1) thematically, they emphasize the reading and circulation of literature in translation, and the narrators are themselves translators in multiple ways; 2) generically, they represent coming-of-age stories; and 3) the selected novels have all been well received in France, having won literary prizes, topped best-seller lists, or been included in scholarly curricula. In other words, I look at works that have reached a fairly wide audience. Additionally, the majority of the novels have also been translated into other languages, including Chinese in the case of Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise and Le dit de Tianyi.

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Focusing on three popular novels that thematically privilege the reading and circulation of literature in translation during the Cultural Revolution raises a number of questions. How are popular depictions of the Cultural Revolution produced and disseminated in a transnational context? How do literary accounts by Chinese diaspora authors writing in French affirm, resist, or challenge dominant narratives about the

Cultural Revolution? How do they affirm, resist, or challenge French audience expectations about Chinese culture and history? What unique insights does literature offer that historical accounts of traumatic upheaval may not?

Literary and Historical Contexts:“A Thousand Cultural Revolutions Have Bloomed”

The last three decades have witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of works published in China and elsewhere depicting and analyzing the Chinese Cultural

Revolution. Contemporary discourses about the Cultural Revolution include historical monographs, personal memoirs, semi-autobiographical novels, fiction, plays, poems, documentaries, dramatic films, unofficial online archives and discussion groups, and most recently, “red tourism”385; there are even Cultural-Revolution-themed restaurants.386

385 In order to legitimize the state’s claim to a revolutionary tradition, and pump revenue into some of China’s poorest regions, the Chinese government launched a “Red Tourism” program in the early 2000s, and encouraged travelers to visit museums and tourist sites of historical and symbolic importance. Today, visitors can stroll through museum exhibits and buy revolutionary memorabilia in museum gift shops. See Perry, Elizabeth J. "Reclaiming the Chinese Cultural Revolution." Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 67.No. 4 (Nov. 2008): 1147-64.

386 Jennifer Hubbert explores how Cultural Revolution theme restaurants in several Chinese cities serve as national sites of contradiction, opposing official interpretations of the GPCR as waste and chaos. Cf. "Revolution Is a Dinner Party: Cultural Revolution Restaurants in Contemporary China." China Review Vol. 5.No. 2, Special Issue on: Collective Memories of the Cultural Revolution (Fall 2005): 125-50. 179

Since the “memory boom” in the 1990s, as Guobin Yang writes, “it has become increasingly difficult to speak of the Cultural Revolution. A thousand Cultural

Revolutions have bloomed.”387 In spite of, or because of this proliferation of narratives, the Cultural Revolution remains “a dark shadow on the Chinese subconscious”388 nearly forty years after its end.

For some scholars, these diverse narratives provide a positive corrective to earlier, more monolithic accounts that either treat the Cultural Revolution as having utopian potential (as per Western Maoists in the 1960s), or condemn it wholesale (as per dominant contemporary opinion). Suzanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, for example, suggests that the plural, fragmentary interpretations circulating today are supplanting the dominant narrative, representing at once a beneficial diversification of historical accounts, and preventing China from coming to terms with its history in a coherent manner.389 In contrast, I propose that if the Cultural Revolution remains a specter on the Chinese subconscious, it is not because of the loss of a master narrative, but precisely because there is a dominant narrative that exists in tension with alternative accounts – and that still tends to overshadow other versions.

Today, most accounts of the Cultural Revolution – historical, autobiographical and fictional – tend to conflate the revolutionary Red Guard movement of 1966 to 1968 with the violent repression associated with the Gang of Four that occurred in the 1970s.

387 Yang, Guobin. "Days of Old Are Not Puffs of Smoke: Three Hypotheses on Collective Memories of the Cultural Revolution." The China Review Vol. 5.No. 2 (Fall 2005): 13-21, p. 15.

388 MacFarquhar, Roderick "The Last Red Bastion." India International Centre Quarterly 36.No. 3/4 (Winter 2009 Spring 2010), p. 224-233, p. 224.

389 Cf. "In Search of a Master Narrative for 20th-Century Chinese History." The China Quarterly No. 188.The History of the PRC (1949-1976) (Dec. 2006): 1070-91. 180

Writers and historians worldwide in other words tend to follow the Chinese Communist

Party’s periodization, which served the purpose of labeling the Red Guards ultra-leftist and the Gang of Four as counter-revolutionary, thereby allowing the Chinese government to discredit both groups and preserve party legitimacy. In 1966, faced with widespread social discontent after the nationwide famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward

(1958-1961), and growing economic inequities between urban and rural areas, Mao

Zedong launched the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in an effort to revive what he believed was a dying revolution. Mao’s attempt to revitalize class struggle and popular democracy spun out of control, exacting an immense social and human toll. The mass youth, or Red Guard movement the Cultural Revolution inspired split into competing factions. Communist leaders struggled for control of the party apparatus, and the People’s

Liberation Army was called upon to prevent the collapse of the Chinese state, and oversee the dispersal of the student Red Guards from the cities to the countryside. Over the course of ten years, over a million people may have been persecuted, and tens of thousands may have died, many of hardship, malnutrition, illness, and suicide.390 The calamities of the Cultural Revolution resulted in the destruction of the fragile foundations of the socialism it sought to nurture as a disillusioned populace and cynical party bureaucrats turned away from socialist politics, and towards reform (gaige) and opening up (kaifang). In order to effectively put into motion its new gaige and kaifang policies, the new party leaders addressed the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in ways designed to placate the public and stabilize party legitimacy.

390 The number of victims remains contested. See Andrew Walder and Yang Su, “The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human Impact.” China Quarterly, March 2003, p. 82-107.

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The official storyline of the Chinese Communist Party stresses “ten years of catastrophe” (shinian haojie) perpetuated by a handful of villains. Published in 1981, the party-sponsored “Resolution on Historical Questions of the Party” describes the Cultural

Revolution as “responsible for the most severe setback and heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the State and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic,” and as an event “initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong.”391 The document then goes on to exculpate Mao by blaming the resultant mayhem of Mao’s bad idea on the “counter- revolutionary forces” who oversaw its planning and realization – the disgraced general

Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, led by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing and comprising her associates, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen.392 By shifting the bulk of the blame to Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, this narrative allows Maoist policies room for error while upholding the overall correctness of Maoist principles, thereby reaffirming the legitimacy and legacy of the Chinese state.

The emergence of a new literary genre called scar literature (shangwen wenxue, literally, “literature of the wounded”) in the late 1970s and reportage literature in the

1980s reinforced this perception of great personal suffering at the hands of a few scoundrels. Written by “victims” of the Cultural Revolution, many of whom were newly rehabilitated party members, most works of this genre take the form of short stories,

391 MacFarquhar, Roderick and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 3. Cited in MacFarquhar, Roderick "The Last Red Bastion." India International Centre Quarterly 36.No. 3/4 (Winter 2009 Spring 2010): 224-33, p.225.

392 In 1981, the four ousted leaders were convicted in a public trial of anti-party activities and public crimes, including usurpation of state power and party leadership, and the persecution of some 750,000 people, nearly 35,000 of whom died between 1966 and 1976. Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao both received death sentences that were later commuted to life sentences, while Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan were sentenced to life and twenty years in prison, respectively. Cf. MacFarquhar, Roderick and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. 182

semi-autobiographical novels, or personal memoirs focusing on the suffering of ordinary citizens during the Cultural Revolution.393 The translation of such texts into English and other languages, as well as memoirs written in the following decades, primarily in

English, by Chinese diaspora writers lent further credibility to the dominant victimization narrative worldwide. Popular books and films such as Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in

Shanghai (1987), Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Generations of Chinese Women

(1991), Anchee Min’s Red Azalea (1994), Ha Jin’s Waiting (1999), and Zhang Yimou’s film To Live (1994) received numerous awards, were translated into many languages, and published or distributed worldwide. Wild Swans, for example, has been published in 37 languages and sold 13 million copies, according to the author’s official Web site.394

Waiting won the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award, and was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. Life and Death in Shanghai topped best-seller lists and was lauded in a Washington Post book review as “[ranking] with the foremost prison diaries of our time.”395 The influence of such popular memoirs cannot be underestimated.

In a study of Wild Swans, Shuyu Kong points out, “Millions of readers who would not normally have come into contact with China will have formed their judgments of its

393 The genre takes its name from a short story called “Wound” (“Shangshen”) by Lu Xinhua published in a Shanghai newspaper, Wenhui bao on August 11, 1978. The story recounts the personal experience of a teenage girl who innocently believes in Cultural Revolution propaganda. As a result of her beliefs, she repudiates her mother, who is accused of being a counter-revolutionary. This repudiation results in years of separation between mother and daughter, and both suffer a great deal throughout the period of political persecution. When her mother is finally rehabilitated, the daughter attempts reconciliation only to find that her mother died of heart failure hours before her arrival. See Tonglin Lu’s "Allegorical and Realistic Portrayals of the Cultural Revolution." Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 58–92, and "Fantasy and Ideology in a Chinese Film: A Žižekian Reading of the Cultural Revolution." positions 12.2 (2004): 539-64.

394 http://www.jungchang.net/jungchang_books_wildswans.asp

395 Cited in the Washington Post obituary, “Author of ‘Life and Death in Shanghai’ Dies at 94”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/03/AR2009110303870.html 183

recent history on Jung Chang’s account.” Jung’s version of the Cultural Revolution, corroborated by its sales numbers and inclusion in academic settings such as in history syllabi, is taken by many readers to be a realistic and accurate portrayal of Chinese politics and life in China.

Part of Wild Swans’ popular success is due to its writing style: it offers Western readers a captivating page-turner. Like other books of its genre, it tends to reduce complex historical events into a simplistic villain-victim narrative. A former Red Guard in Sichuan province who fled to England after the Cultural Revolution, Jung Chang traces her family’s generational trials and tribulations against the turmoil of modern Chinese history, portraying herself as a victim and survivor of China’s political upheavals. Having the luck and savvy to immigrate to the West in 1978, Jung portrays herself as a humane

Red Guard, never duped like so many others by Mao’s propaganda. In offering Western readers an engrossing, dramatic tale of victimization, as Shuyu Kong asserts, Jung Chang elides all evidence of personal collaboration or involvement in misdeeds or violence.396

While the widespread persecutions, public humiliations, and factional warfare of the Cultural Revolution period cannot be denied and should not be overlooked, victimization tales such as this mask important aspects of the larger story. By creating a simplistic dichotomy between good and evil, victim and perpetrator, they fail to account for individual responsibility and agency. A notable exception to the dominant victim- villain dichotomy that structures best-selling narratives about the Cultural Revolution is

Rae Yang’s Spider Eaters, a complex narrative that evokes the ambivalence of the

396 See Kong, Shuyu. "Swan and Spider Eater in Problematic Memoirs of Cultural Revolution." positions 7.1 (Spring 1999): 243-58.

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period. Yang portrays an ardent young girl devoted to Mao and the revolution, as both victim and victimizer.397 Currently a professor of Chinese language and literature at

Dickinson College, she describes her personal involvement in beating, stealing, and criticizing class enemies, including teachers and classmates, and admits to having felt little sympathy for those she targeted, believing them to be traitors to the revolution. In contrast to Wild Swans, which invites the reader to identify with a rational narrator who holds herself above the fray, Spider Eaters leads the reader into an uneasy identification with a morally ambivalent narrator.

While less well-known internationally than Anglophone Cultural Revolution memoirs, Francophone accounts of the Chinese Cultural Revolution have been very well- received in France, as well as worldwide in translation. Below, I show how three

Francophone Cultural Revolution texts simultaneously affirm and complicate dominant discourses about the Cultural Revolution, as well as about cultural difference. Reading the texts in conjunction with their cultural, historical and political contexts, I argue that while they depart radically from the Cultural Revolution narratives of the 1980s and early

1990s, they nevertheless maintain a similar set of historically determined oppositions.

Whereas the earlier Cold War-era narratives tend to depict a polarized ideological struggle between (Western) capitalist and (Eastern) communist societies, culminating in a liberatory escape to the West, Dai Sijie, François Cheng and Wei-Wei’s texts all brush over the political content of the Cultural Revolution in favor of a narrative that privileges coming-of-age during a revolution that, for the most part, is remarkably devoid of

397 Rae Yang, Spider Eaters: A Memoir, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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revolutionary struggle. As I will show, this elision of political content is replaced by an emphasis on cultural identity and difference as seen through the lens of translation/the translator. A grid of oppositions remains but political or class struggle has morphed into civilizational and linguistic differences. I suggest that this shift reflects the wider post-

Cold War, post-socialist emphasis on ethics, human rights, and bourgeois individualism.398 On the one hand, these texts reinforce ethnocentric oppositions and stereotypes. On the other, by foregrounding processes of translation, they call attention to the possibility of misreading and mistranslation, destabilizing their own authority and by extension, the authority of the authors to speak for, or from any fixed “Chinese” identity.

Moreover, the novels’ presentation of the French as the language of liberation brackets out its history as the language of domination in colonial contexts.

Une autre rééducation: Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise

Published by Gallimard in 2000, Dai Sijie’s first French-language novel, Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, (hereafter Balzac) has won several literary awards, been translated into over 30 languages, and adapted into a Chinese-language film. 399 After

398 For more on the “ethical turn,” see Julian Bourg. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 in Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007.

399 Produced with Chinese actors and shot in Hunan, the film is banned in China. It premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2002 and was nominated for the best foreign film at the 2003 Golden Globe awards, enabling Dai to be recognized internationally as a “Franco-Chinese” writer and director. For perceptive studies of his film work, see Michelle Bloom, “Contemporary Franco-Chinese Cinema: Translation, Citation and Imitation in Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There?" Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22.4 (2006): 311-25, and Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, "Dai Sijie: Locating the Third Culture in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" in Adapted for the 186

achieving enormous success in France, it was belatedly translated into Chinese and published first in Taiwan, then in mainland China where it met with a more ambivalent reception.400 Based largely on the author’s personal experience as a reeducated youth during the Cultural Revolution, Balzac is a coming-of-age tale in which two educated urban youths are sent to labor camps to “learn from the masses” in the countryside. Their real reeducation, however, comes through the illicit reading of French literature. French, as the language of self-liberation, is associated with Enlightenment ideals and human rights, as well as with a certain idea of France as a world literary capital. This representation is juxtaposed with a contrasting image of revolutionary era China as backwards, irrational, and anti-intellectual.

Although I largely agree with scholarly critiques which hold that Balzac is somewhat one-dimensional and reductive in both its idealization of French literature and characterization of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I would argue that something more complicated is taking place on a literary and thematic level, as well as in terms of marketing and public reception. While Balzac indulges the cultural narcissism of Western audiences, it also, via the trope of translation, points to the contradictions and ideological values that structure the formation of cultural identities, calling any static reading of identity into question.

Lawrence Venuti’s important study, The Scandals of Translation provides a

Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film. University of Hawai'i Press, 2010. 123- 48.

400 The novel was translated into Chinese by Yu Zhongxian in 2003 and became available on the mainland China market in 2006, with a number of notable changes, including the addition of several classics of Chinese literature to the secret cache of forbidden literature.

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useful frame for thinking about the reception of Balzac. Venuti advances that the global marketplace is dominated by Anglophone works in translation, and tends to favor the reading preferences of Anglo-American readers. Legitimacy and best-seller status are in turn conferred by institutions such as PEN and UNESCO that, as Emily Apter puts it, distribute awards that “implicitly reward a kind of writing compatible with the normative baggage of the award.”401 As a result, popular genres such as thrillers, romance novels, or texts read for entertainment that often glamorize metropolitan life and values, are disproportionately published, leaving certain works “untranslatable” because they are unmarketable, either too exotic or not exotic enough.

Whether consciously or subconsciously influenced by market demands, Dai’s novel seems to have hit the transnational literary jackpot: it has been consecrated with five French literary awards, best-seller status in France, translation into numerous languages, inclusion in French school curricula, and adaptation into a globally circulated film. Published in the same year that another Chinese writer and French citizen, Gao

Xingjian, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise received the Prix Roland Jouvenel conferred by the Académie française, and the

Prix Relay du roman d’évasion organized by the travel services conglomerate Lagardère.

The latter prize emphasizes the book’s easy consumption and transportability. It can be packed into a carry-on as light vacation reading; wherever the reader may be, it immerses the reader in a picturesque and exotic locale. Yet, per Apter’s description, Balzac is not too exotic, for it operates within a framework of oppositions familiar to Western

401 “‘Untranslatable Algeria’: The Politics of Linguicide” in The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 102. 188

audiences: urban/rural, bourgeois/peasant, modern/primitive, orality/literacy, self/other, male (as agent of knowledge)/female (as receiver of knowledge).

The novel opens with an encounter between the two protagonists, Luo and Ma, and the farmers and peasant workers they are sent to live with in an isolated mountain village. Having just trekked all the way across the mountains, exhausted and mud-soaked, the bourgeois city youth and their peasant “captors” are described in antagonistic terms:

“We looked like pathetic reactionary soldiers from a propaganda film after their capture by a horde of Communist farm workers.” Immediately upon arrival, they are distinguished from the horde of peasants by class. Their literacy and possession of a violin and an alarm clock brand them as outsiders to the Chinese farmers who have come to inspect the two “foreigners” and their foreign objects. In asides to the reader such as

“Chers lecteurs,” and “Vous vous en souvenez certainement […],” the narrator creates a complicity with the Francophone reader, who is invited to share the derision of the peasant captors:

Levant le violon à hauteur de ses yeux, [le chef du village] le secoua avec frénésie, comme s’il attendait que quelque chose tombât du fond noir de la caisse sonore. J’avais l’impression que les cordes allaient casser sur le coup, et les frettes s’envoler en morceaux. Presque tout le village était là, en bas de cette maison sur pilotis perdue au sommet de la montagne. Des hommes, des femmes, des enfants grouillaient à l’intérieur, s’accrochaient aux fenêtres, se bouscalaient devant la porte. Comme rien ne tombait de mon instrument, le chef approcha son nez du trou noir et renifla un bon coup. Plusieurs gros poils, longs et sales, qui sortaient de sa narine gauche, se mirent à grelotter.402

To prevent the uncultured peasant community from destroying the “jouet bourgeois,” Luo and Ma play a song Luo ingeniously titles, “Mozart pense au président Mao.” The

402 Ibid., p. 10. 189

comedy of the scene depends upon the disparity between the audience and the narrator’s shared knowledge (of what a violin and a sonata are, of who Mozart was), and the peasants’ ignorance. This disparity emphasizes class differences as well as what Rey

Chow terms the inequitable temporalities between cultures and languages. The urban, educated youth with their manipulation of the technological symbols of progress are on the side of modernity, while rural China is rendered as ignorant and backwards. The

Chinese peasants are depicted as illiterate, coarse, bestial: they swarm like insects, cling to the windows, and shove against each other (“grouillaient à l’intérieur, s’accrochaient aux fênetres, se bousculaient devant la porte”); the village chief smells the violin twitching his long, dirty nose hairs as an animal might sniff an unknown object. Dai Sijie, through his narrator, situates himself on the side of modernity and mobilizes the class instincts of his likely (French) readers, while the Chinese peasants and the revolutionary movement that granted the peasants authority symbolize primitiveness, ignorance, and lack of culture.

The inequitable temporalities between cultures are underscored in a literal fashion through the protagonists’ use of an alarm clock. Since the peasants have never seen a clock before and do not know how to tell time, Ma and Luo are able to manipulate time by setting the clock backwards or forwards. In doing so, they are able to direct the work schedule and tempo of the village. The chief of the village is especially intrigued by this strange object, and usurps the power it accords when the two teenagers are sent to town for an errand. Furthermore, while the Chinese seamstress of the book’s title is described as having “une nature primitive” and being “pas civilisée,” the French books Ma and Luo discover are said to possess “une lointaine odeur de civilisation” (62). Luo takes it upon

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himself to “civilize” the seamstress by reading Balzac novels to her. In this instance, translation suggests the inferiority of the home culture: Balzac and Western literature stand for civilization, while China, embodied by the seamstress, is depicted as primitive, needing the civilizational advantage of an education in French literature. The seamstress is also depicted in this initial description as a passive receiver of knowledge.

Ultimately, the joke is on Luo and Ma, as their plan for transforming the seamstress into a sophisticated young woman backfires, and they end up burning the illicit books they risked so much to obtain. Over the course of being read Balzac and

Flaubert, the seamstress slowly transforms from “une simple montagnarde” into a fashionable, ambitious woman conscious of her country bumpkin accent. Realizing that

“la beauté d’une femme est un trésor qui n’a pas de prix,” (229) the seamstress fashions herself a bra, a fitted Mao jacket and smart white shoes, affects a city accent, and leaves the mountain – and a flabbergasted Luo and Ma – behind. What the seamstress seems to have learned and internalized is a sense of individualism that manifests itself in an attention to fashion, romance, and urban life.

In effect, Balzac ironically enacts a reversal of the ideological transformation that the Chinese Cultural Revolution intended. In launching the Cultural Revolution, Mao envisioned a transformation of people’s beliefs and behavior as a necessary precondition for a permanent revolution. Revolution could not be achieved, in fact it would be undermined, Mao believed, unless peasants became aware of their agency to change history and construct a socialist Chinese nation-state strong enough to oppose Western imperialism. Literature and art served as paramount political instruments, an argument

Mao advanced as early as the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art of 1942. He saw the

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circulation of “Red classics” as instrumental to the transformation and politicization of popular consciousness. Ironically, what we get in Balzac is not a peasant who attains revolutionary consciousness through exposure to revolutionary art but one who adopts bourgeois consciousness modeled on nineteenth-century French literature.

We might read this ironic reversal as an implicit critique of Maoism and the

Cultural Revolution, as a kind of jest on Mao. On one hand, it can be read as an

“emancipation” of the seamstress from her circumscribed life as an uneducated, rural female peasant laborer. Yet, considering the fates of the female heroines of her two favorite French novels, the Count of Monte Cristo (Mercédès joins a convent and is never heard from again) and Madame Bovary (Emma commits suicide), one has to wonder what kind of emancipation her departure represents. Indeed, the seamstress leaves her natal village only after very narrowly escaping social ostracism with the aid of Ma.

Pregnant and terrified, she enlists the help of Ma to secure an illegal abortion. Left unresolved in the novel is just what kind of choices the illiterate seamstress might have once she leaves the village.403

In a counter-reversal to the implied critique of Mao, the disappointed protagonists

Luo and Ma burn the French books they had once cherished, in an ironic reenactment of a common tactic of Red Guard censorship during the Cultural Revolution. The gesture also evokes the typical disillusionment experienced by protagonists in many nineteenth- century French novels. In the end, nineteenth-century French literature has helped to erode community stability. While very effective in cultivating individual desires and

403 As famously remarked in a talk given at the Beijing Women’s Normal College in 1923 about the immense popularity among Chinese feminists of Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, “What happens after Nora leaves home?”

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dreams, it offers little in the way of helping to realize them. These two plot twists make it impossible to read Balzac as either a straightforward critique of Maoism or as an idealization of French literature. I would thus agree with Yvonne Hsieh’s argument that

Balzac is a cautionary tale about misreading404, but I would add that through the trope of translation, the incorporation of multiple perspectives, and the mise-en-abime structure of the text, Balzac also points to the manifold subject positions that reading, storytelling and translation open up.

In the first place, translation is a recurring trope that functions as a mechanism of social exchange and transformation. In Balzac, translation begins with an individual act of reading that results in a new subjectivity through identification with a story’s characters, and more importantly, through the act of storytelling. Ma, for instance, is most taken with Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe and its portrayal of one man’s triumph over a lifetime of obstacles:

Jean-Christophe, avec son individualisme acharné, sans aucune mesquinerie, fut pour moi une révélation salutaire. Sans lui, je ne serais jamais parvenu à comprendre la splendeur et l’ampleur de l’individualisme. Jusqu’à cette rencontre volée avec Jean-Christophe, ma pauvre tête éduquée et rééduquée ignorait tout simplement qu’on pût lutter seul contre le monde entier.405

It is his admiration for Jean-Christophe that makes him desire, for the first time in his life, to possess a book all for himself and “non plus comme un patrimoine commun à Luo et à moi.” He has Luo dedicate Jean-Christophe to him for his twentieth birthday, and in

404 "Splendeurs Et Misères Des Mots: Balzac Et La Petite Tailleuse Chinoise De Dai Sijie." Etudes Francophones 17 (2002): 93-105.

405 Balzac, p. 137.

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exchange, he dedicates three Balzac books to Luo. At this moment of property exchange, we finally learn the anonymous narrator’s name:

Sous ma dédicace, je dessinai trois objets qui représentaient chacun des trois caractères chinois composant mon nom. Pour le premier, je dessinai un cheval au galop, hennissant, avec une somptueuse crinière flottant au vent. Pour le deuxième, je représentai une épée longue et pointue, avec un manche en os finement ouvragé, enchâssé de diamants. Quant au troisième, ce fut une petite clochette de troupeau, autour de laquelle j’ajoutai de nombreux traits formant un rayonnement, comme si elle avait remué, retenti, pour appeler au secours.406

It is also after this moment of self-naming that the narrator begins to take on greater storytelling agency. Although Ma has been the main first-person narrator since the beginning of the tale, he has operated rather like Venuti’s invisible translator, allowing himself to go unnamed while granting all storytelling power to Luo. Luo is the talented storyteller, able to craftily weave quick tales to get himself and Ma out of trouble with the village chief, and to evoke tears from any audience with his dramatic storytelling. Luo is also the little seamstress’ lover. But if Ma, for the first half of the book is merely a sidekick, halfway through the narration, Luo disappears on a family errand, and Ma takes over as the little seamstress’ companion and ad hoc educator. He visits her regularly to prevent other young men from befriending her, and more importantly, to read French books to her. In this transfer of roles, Ma’s process of translation becomes visible:

Lire à haute voix une page entier me paraissait insupportablement ennuyeux, et je décidai de faire une lecture approximative, c’est-à-dire que je lisais d’abord deux ou trois pages ou un court chapitre […] Puis, après une courte rumination, je lui posais une question ou lui demandais de deviner ce qui allait se passer. Une fois qu’elle avait répondu, je lui racontais ce qu’il y avait dans le livre, presque paragraphe par paragraphe. De temps à autre, je ne pouvais m’empêcher d’ajouter des petites touches personnelles, pour que l’histoire amusât davantage. Il

406 Ibid, p. 138. 194

m’arrivait même d’inventer des situations, quand je trouvais que le vieux père Balzac était fatigué.407

The liberty that Ma takes in translating Balzac evokes a late Qing tradition of novelistic translation. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of translated Western fiction in China. The style of translation was determined by its form, with an all-knowing storyteller inserted into the narration of

Western novels. As David Pollard writes, “…the long novels were told by a story-teller in episodes with versified chapter headings and chapter endings…The story-teller intervened freely in his narrative, to express judgments… and to direct the progress of the story. The reader was constantly reminded that the story-teller was in control.”408 The story of Ursule Mirouet or the Count of Monte Cristo thus becomes Ma’s story. In the tradition of renowned late Qing translators of French literature, Ma discovers his agency and voice in the act of translating. In the process, he transforms himself, the original story, and his audience (the seamstress).

It is through reading, adapting, and bartering stories that friendships and alliances are formed, favors and services exchanged, and the narrator comes into his own as a storyteller. At the same time, the story is not told solely through Ma’s perspective. The novel includes three separate chapters narrated from the perspectives of the seamstress,

Luo, and a local miller who witnesses an amorous encounter between Luo and the seamstress. These short chapters focus on each character’s perception of the relationship between Luo and the seamstress. Up to this point, the seamstress is seen entirely through

407 Emphasis mine. Ibid, p. 186-187.

408 Pollard, David, ed. Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1998, p. 15. 195

the narrator’s eyes and appears devoid of any interiority. For the seamstress, it is not simply listening to foreign fiction, but performing passages from the texts that sparks a transformation. It is after she and Luo stage an impromptu, imagined scene between the

Count of Monte Cristo and Mercédès that, suddenly, her sense of self is expanded:

“C’était pour moi une expérience toute nouvelle. Avant je n’imaginais pas qu’on puisse jouer quelqu’un qu’on n’est pas tout en restant soi-même, par exemple jouer une femme riche et << contente >>, alors que je ne le suis pas du tout.”409

This quote points to the multiple levels of mirroring and transculturation occurring in the text. Luo, Ma and the seamstress undergo transformations by identifying with particular characters (Jean-Christophe, the Count of Monte Cristo, Mercédès, Emma

Bovary) in nineteenth-century French novels. By transmitting or acting out those stories, they in turn become storytellers. On another level still, the implied reader mirrors the actual readers. What might be the significance of this mise en abime? That is, what is the significance of French/Francophone readers reading a novel about Chinese youth undergoing a cultural revolution, who in turn are reading nineteenth-century French literature – a literature with its own relationship to revolution?

The jeu-de-miroir structure, for one thing, reveals interesting connections between the novel’s reception, and the formation of cultural identities, both domestic and foreign.

With respect to Chinese cultural identity, the historical and geographical particularities of the main characters are notably generic if not altogether absent. Aside from the alarm clock that Luo and Ma tinker with to the point of completely forgetting what time it actually is, we have little indication of what year, month, or time events actually take

409 Balzac, p. 180. 196

place. In a country as massive and geographically and ethnically diverse as China, we know only that Luo and Ma have been sent to the exotic-sounding (and perhaps symbolically named) “Phoenix of the Sky” mountain near the village of Yong Jing. The author-narrator offers us a mere “deux mots sur la rééducation," namely that almost anyone with a high school education was considered “intellectual” and in need of reeducation. Noting that the real reason Mao decided to launch the Cultural Revolution remains debatable, the narrator hastily concludes that it must have been because “Mao haïssait les intellectuels.” As for the characters’ psychological depth, although the text is written in the first person and from multiple perspectives, we learn surprisingly little about each character’s inner world. Aside from descriptions of the seamstress’ beauty and the peasants’ animal-like, uncivilized behavior, the narrative focuses on the plot of illicit reading, and the humorous adventures and misadventures that ensue. The few instances of psychological description or reflection occur as responses to texts/performances: the narrator’s awakening after reading Jean-Christophe, the seamstress’ new consciousness after embodying an affluent French woman through role-play. Ultimately, as the title suggests, this is a book about Balzac, as a metonym for French literature and culture, and his influence on a young Chinese seamstress, who has no name and no specific identity other than as love interest and representative peasant laborer.

This anonymity is crucial to the cultural affinity between the Western reader and the Chinese narrator, and to the novel’s popular global reception. In his study of translated bestsellers, Venuti draws upon to identify a “popular aesthetic” favoring realist discourse as a strategy pursued (consciously or unconsciously) by writers and publishing companies. Noting that a bestseller “must be intelligible within

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the different, potentially conflicting odes and ideologies that characterize [particular] audience[s],”410 Venuti argues that,

Bestsellers blur the distinction between art and life by sharing a specific discourse: although cast into various genres—fiction and non-fiction, novel and history, romance and memoir, horror and self-help—they favor melodramatic realism that solicits the reader’s vicarious participation. This is perhaps most clear with bestselling fiction, which depends for its success on the reader’s sympathetic identification with characters who confront contemporary social problems.411

Although Venuti’s study focuses on best-selling translations of foreign texts, his argument is applicable and salient to bestsellers by diaspora writers purportedly representative of a foreign culture. The more anonymous and generic the (foreign) people, place and time of a work of fiction, the more utilizable it is as a projection screen for the reader’s own experiences – that is, the more easily it can be domesticated into a new market, whether French or Chinese.

In the long run, best-selling novels by Chinese diaspora writers, in a manner similar to the European travel essay and ethnographic text, may offer more insight into

French identity than into that of the foreign culture. That is, texts like Balzac fail to tell us very much about Chinese culture, identity or history, but in that failure, they productively illuminate how a domestic French subject with a particular ideological position informed by various codes and agendas is constructed via the representation of a foreign culture.

Domestic cultural identities, as Venuti writes, are formed through a process of

“mirroring” or self-recognition:

…the foreign text becomes intelligible when the reader recognizes himself or herself in the translation by identifying the domestic values that motivated the

410 The Scandals of Translation: Toward an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge, 1998, p. 124.

411 Ibid, p. 126. 198

selection of that particular foreign text, and that are inscribed in it through a particular discursive strategy. The self-recognition is a recognition of the domestic cultural norms and resources that constitute the self, that define it as a domestic subject. The process is basically narcissistic: the reader identifies with an ideal projected by the translation, usually values that have achieved authority in the domestic culture […].412

In Balzac, the impact of self-recognition is doubled through the stylistic strategy of jeu- de-miroir, which also serves to extend the melodramatic realism of nineteenth-century

French novels. As Luo, Ma and the seamstress identify with the characters in these stories, often by altering the texts, so the implied and actual reader(s) may have had similar experiences of reading, perhaps even specifically reading Balzac, Dumas or

Flaubert, in their youth. While the reeducation campaign and rural life in the mountains may appear foreign to Western readers, so little of this context is described that the reader’s attention is focused entirely on the central plot intrigue, which involves bourgeois “social problems” such as rebelling against authority, discovering oneself through reading and new friendships, negotiating a love triangle, and so forth.

Ultimately Balzac, as Venuti has formulated, has “created and consolidated the terms of cultural recognition for both hegemonic and developing countries but without in any way diminishing the linguistic and cultural hierarchies in which these countries continue to be positioned.”413 French is not only privileged as the language of emancipation, its revered status is advanced by Dai’s repetition of the melodramatic realist form of the nineteenth-century French novel. Through a narrative structure that oscillates between foregrounding binary cultural and class differences, dismantling them

412 Emphasis mine. Ibid, p. 78.

413 Ibid, p. 170.

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(through the trope of translation and plot reversals), and resetting them (through jeu-de- miroir), Balzac and its French reception affirms a certain idea of “Frenchness” while simultaneously questioning the power of literature, of its potential to both emancipate and betray.

Gender, Language and Pedagogy in Une Fille Zhuang

While an unexpected encounter with French literature in translation serves to create, cement and in the end destabilize relationships in Balzac, the memoir Une Fille

Zhuang (Éd. de l’Aube, 2006)414 recounts how the author’s unanticipated turn to French provides a degree of order and stability in an uncertain and chaotic era. Like Luo and Ma,

Wei-Wei spends much of her time during the Revolution searching for illicit French literature that she reads both in translation and in the original French. The only one of the three texts in this chapter to be based entirely on the author’s life, Une Fille Zhuang takes place between 1974 and 1981, offering the reader a glimpse of the close of the Maoist era. Wei-Wei’s adolescence overlaps with the rustification campaign, the slow re-opening of universities, and the opening of China and its markets to foreigners. At 17, Wei-Wei is sent to work in the fields immediately after graduating from high school. Later, she becomes one of the lucky few to be sent to university. She is selected based on her excellent scores in Mandarin language and literature to study French. The text follows her

414 The title refers to her minority (non-Han) ethnicity. The daughter of a Zhuang father and a Hakka mother, Wei-Wei belongs to two of the largest ethnic minority groups in China. As of 2010, China officially recognized 55 ethnic minority groups comprising less than 10 percent of the country’s population. 200

initial studies at the Institute of Minorities in the southern province of Guangxi to her enrollment in Beijing’s prestigious Institute of Foreign Languages.

With its focus on learning French, simple language, and exaltation of nineteenth- century French literature, Une Fille Zhuang, like Balzac and la petite tailleuse chinoise, have been endorsed as part of a “Parcours littéraire francophone” in French secondary schools. Promoted by the Centre Régional de documents pédagogiques (CRDP), a Paris- based service for local teachers and students of French and other subjects, the memoir is presented as “un témoignage sur la société chinoise après la Révolution culturelle.” On its

Website, the CRDP provides a dossier on Wei Wei and Une Fille Zhuang, recommending that teachers focus on topics such as “La répression et le contrôle des intellectuels pendant et après la Révolution culturelle,” “le rôle de la langue française dans le développement d’une conscience individuelle,” “la place de la femme dans la société chinoise et dans le roman,” and “Pourquoi le français ?”415 Describing Wei-Wei as “une victime du farce du destin” and her youth as “placée sous le signe du huanglian,

‘l’amertume absolue,’” the CRDP invites readers to interpret Une Fille Zhuang through the lens of scar literature. This genre is emphasized despite the fact that Wei-Wei has repeatedly refused to qualify her experience as “trauma,” and has insisted on telling her own story, rather than a story of the Cultural Revolution:

Un roman ne prétend pas être la mémoire collective d’un tel [sic] ou tel événement. Il ne se veut ni objectif ni complet. Il y a une Révolution culturelle en Chine, mais un milliard de Chinois. Qui pourrait dire que la vision d’un Chinois de ce cataclysme national est moins, ou plus vraie, que celle d’un autre? […] Je raconte des histoires mais pas l’Histoire. Ce qui m’intéresse ici n’est pas la

415 http://crdp.ac-paris.fr/parcours/index.php/category/weiwei

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Révolution culturelle, ni les blessures ou les cicatrices qu’elle a laissées, mais ce qui m’a amené à étudier le français, ce que m’a apporté la découverte d’une langue complètement différente de la mienne, la rencontre en moi de deux civilisations à la fois opposées et complémentaires, l’influence d’un tel entrecroisement sur ma conception du monde et de l’homme ainsi que mes premières expériences sentimentales.416

It should be noted, also, that Wei-Wei here identifies her memoir as “un roman” rather than “un témoignage”; additionally, she insists on a distinction between “des histoires” and “l’Histoire”; and similar to Dai Sijie, she emphasizes that this memoir of the Cultural

Revolution is not so much about the Cultural Revolution as about her study of French, her adventure with a language and civilization seen as radically other, yet complementary. In effect, Une Fille Zhuang presents itself as a novel about and in the

French language.

In emphasizing the romanesque qualities of her work, Wei-Wei purposely distances herself from memoir writers, and the juridical expectations of “truth” that come with the genre of memoir. More importantly, it calls its own account of events into question, refusing assimilation into any master narratives about the Cultural Revolution, or into any discourses about “History.” Wei-Wei thus creates a separation between her personal history and History. While on the one hand, Wei-Wei refuses the assimilation of her story into dominant narratives of History417, on the other, her self-conscious distinction between personal history and History appears symptomatic of a trend towards

416 Entretien dans les documents complémentaires: http://crdp.acparis.fr/parcours/index.php/category/weiwei?paged=4

417 The repudiation of Maoism, May ’68, and revolutionary solutions to the problems of capitalist modernity in general by the French media and prominent French intellectuals; the belated confirmation of the “truth” value of Simon Leys’ (Pierre Rycksmans) Les Habits neufs du président Mao (1971), which, at the time of its publication was one of the only accounts of the Cultural Revolution critical of Mao and Maoism. 202

dehistoricization and depoliticization prevalent in both France and China since the late

1970s, when Western leftists first began to be disillusioned with socialism and Deng

Xiaoping embarked on a reform agenda. That is, history (both personal and with a capital h), as it has been narrated since the end of the Cold War and the rise of what many scholars call neoliberalism in 1989, has largely marginalized, or erased revolutionary counter-histories.

Depoliticization in Une Fille Zhuang manifests itself as a quest for identity, and more particularly as a fascination with French language, literature and culture as the

“other” of Chinese culture. That is, any revolutionary content, or sense of why the reeducation campaign was initiated, or what Wei-Wei thought of it, have been displaced onto an individual’s struggle to define herself, and the main vehicle of that quest is not state-enforced reeducation but a serendipitous encounter with French. Of the reeducation campaign, Wei-Wei concludes over the course of three pages that it was difficult, both physically and psychologically, but she adapted and learned to live, farm, and work as a rural laborer. The rest of the novel focuses on her adventures (and misadventures) with the French language – the linguistic and cultural differences between French and

Chinese, the difficulty of French phonetics, definite articles, numbers, and conjugation – and French literature. One day she learns that “ce que l’on m’enseigne n’est pas le français.” That is, the copies of l’Hebdo Pékin that the students are given to read and translate, do not exactly reflect a natural-sounding French, or give them any sense of

French culture. By chance, she discovers a forgotten trove of dust-covered French texts in the school library – Les Misérables, Les Trois mousquetaires, Le Rouge et le noir,

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Illusions perdues – and with these nineteenth-century novels, her “real” French lessons, and eventual transculturation begins.

According to the CRDP, France serves as China’s “other” in Une Fille Zhuang because it represents liberty and freedom of individual expression in opposition to

China’s state-sponsored oppression and negation of individuality. It is French that allows

Wei-Wei to develop her individual consciousness and enables “la revendication d’une individualité”; it is the reading of French novels that permits “l’émancipation de la jeune femme.” This language is troubling, not only because it reinforces the entrenched dichotomies – Chinese oppression versus Western liberty, Chinese versus

Western individualism – but because its use as a pedagogical tool amplifies its reach and authority. I would argue that Wei-Wei resists this reductive categorization, though I also think that, at the same time, she introduces another set of dichotomies based on the linguistic – and by extension – cultural differences between France and China.

In the chapter titled “Premiers chocs,” in which describes her first encounter with

French, she contemplates the differences between a phonetic language like French and an ideographic one like Chinese, the lack or presence of gendered nouns, and the lack of verbal tenses in Chinese. Time, described as precise and linear (“à la fois précis et nuancé”) in French, is presumed to be continuous and circular in Chinese (“impersonnel, intemporel, circulaire”). According to Wei-Wei, while French with its numerous tenses and modes offers “une langue littéraire géniale" to describe the psychological evolution of people and literary characters, as well as a rigorous, juridical language, the Chinese language’s reliance on the infinitive form of verbs emphasizes stability and the eternal.

As many linguists and literary critics have shown, however, the concept of Chinese as an

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ideographic language is a longstanding myth: in fact, no purely ideographic language exists.418 The idea that Chinese “lacks grammar” because it lacks tenses, moods and gender is another myth that has been used to support the portrayal of China as backwards and stagnant, existing outside of time and history.

In addition to (perhaps inadvertently) reinforcing entrenched perceptions of the linguistic differences between French and Chinese, Wei-Wei perpetuates a certain notion of Chinese women. As its title implies, Une Fille Zhuang is the story of a young Zhuang girl or daughter who comes of age during the Cultural Revolution. 419 In contrast to the main female character in Balzac who serves primarily as a love interest for the male protagonists, Wei-Wei’s narrator provides a female perspective, and delves more deeply into themes of gender and sexuality during the Cultural Revolution. On a narrative level, the plot revolves not just around her reading forbidden French books, but the relation between reading illicit texts and her revolt against the societal expectations of Chinese women in choosing a marriage partner

Comment ai-je pu oublier que le marriage, en Chine, avant d’être une affaire entre deux individus qui s’aiment, est d’abord une affaire familiale? Que l’on n’épouse pas un homme ou une femme, mais sa famille? Que les enfants n’ont pas le droit de dire oui ou non sans avoir consulté les parents? Comment ai-je osé croire, moi, une fille chinoise extraordinairement ordinaire, que je faisais une exception à la règle générale? A qui la faute? A Bajin! A ! A Tolstoï! A ! A Dumas! A Hugo! A Chateaubriand! A Gide!... à tous ces auteurs à la fois si lointains et si proches que je fréquente ces derniers temps. C’est la faute de leurs pages au levain pervers de liberté individuelle dont je me délecte en cachette.420

418 See Rey Chow, "How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory." PMLA Vol. 116.No. 1 (Jan. 2001): 69-74.

419 With a current population of approximately 18 million, the Zhuang ethnic group represents the largest of 56 ethnic minority groups officially recognized by the People’s Republic of China.

420 Une Fille Zhuang, p. 171.

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At first glance, this passage appears to corroborate the CRDP’s opposition of (Western) liberty and individualism versus (Chinese) oppression and social collectivism, with women’s rights figuring as a trope of difference. But an examination of the passage against the historical specificities of the period reveals that such readings conflate

Maoism, Cultural Revolution, and Chinese oppression of women. In fact, as seen in earlier chapters of this dissertation, “women’s liberation” and opposition to arranged marriages played a central part in the Communist agenda to revolutionize China. When the CCP took power in 1949, one of its first priorities was the passage of the New

Marriage Act in 1950, which abolished arranged marriages, child marriage, and concubinage. In 1950, as well as during the Cultural Revolution, Mao attempted to overturn Confucian traditions, and create a new society based on the awakening of individual consciousness. While this attempt was not without contradiction, the lack of free choice in marriage and the criticism of those who, like Wei-Wei, pursued their individual desires against the wishes of their parents cannot be conflated with the

Cultural Revolution.421 Moreover, the allusion to New Culture writers and

Dingling along with Tolstoy, Stendhal and Hugo points to the interconnectedness of the

421 Many feminist critics for instance have criticized the gender equality movement under communism as serving state interests at the expense of women’s rights. Gender equality during this period they argue, made women doubly oppressed by adding to their duties and burdens while negating sexuality and sexual difference. See … Other scholars have argued that sex and sexuality was aggressively policed, regulated and silenced by the Maoist state while still other studies suggest that individual Red Guards were behind the policing of sex, and that in fact, much sexual discourse and interaction existed. See…

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French revolutionary tradition and proponents of a new culture in China that could only be realized through revolution.422

More interestingly, there is a linkage between gender, language and pedagogy that evokes French colonialism while simultaneously glossing over it. In the first place, Wei-

Wei’s initiation into French requires an abrupt rupture with her past and with her mother.

She must abandon her childhood dreams of studying medicine. French is her only higher education option given the government’s need to train interpreters to work in

Francophone Africa. Moreover, she cannot enroll in the university until she denounces her mother, who was expelled from the Party for expressing rightist language in the anti- rightist Hundred Flowers campaign of 1957. Following the loss of her childhood aspirations and the denunciation of her mother, Wei-Wei’s French lessons begin to her surprise with arms training and military exercises: “Le 16 octobre 1976, ma vie d’étudiante en langue française commence par quinze jours d’entraînement militaire.

Première semaine, formation […] Deuxième semaine, nous passons à une affaire plus sérieuse: nous devons apprendre cette fois à manier le fusil et à tirer.”423

Her first two weeks of “French training” alludes to (without rendering explicit) two important historical moments linking China, France, and Africa. First, Francophone

African regions that became Francophone through colonial force and violence is evoked

422 New Culture writers such as Ba Jin and Dingling saw traditional, in particular Confucian, Chinese culture as moribund and in need of radical change. Ba Jin, whose pen name is an amalgam of the Russian anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin, was an avid reader of Western literature, particularly of Tolstoy, Turgenez and Zola, and had spent a year studying in Paris in 1927. He was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution as a counter-revolutionary before being rehabilitated in the late 1970s. Dingling, similarly, has written of her indebtedness to Western realism, and although she was active in the Chinese revolutionary cause, was persecuted as a rightist during the purges of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution.

423 Ibid., p. 44-45. 207

through the military reference and circumstantial conditions that lead her to studying

French. Paralleling Wei-Wei’s introduction to French, mandatory instruction in French language in African colonies occurred in tandem with military take-over, and devalued mother tongues and native cultures. Second, the very fact that she is made to study

French points to the historical contingencies of Maoist-era foreign and educational policy. There was a need for French interpreters in Africa because of China’s evolving relations with Africa as a supporter of Third World decolonization movements worldwide. China began sending ambassadors to Africa in 1969, and was highly active in

Africa in the 1970s. During this time, China became the largest Communist-bloc provider of aid to Africa, sending money, arms, and numerous cultural, technical and governmental delegations. Yet, these echoes of historical political struggle, of Mao’s

Three Worlds Theory are displaced by a focus on language learning and cultural identity.

Paralleling the gendered nature of colonial relations in which the colonized subject is feminized, and French colonial institutions are masculinized, French language education is imparted through male teachers and male authors (Hugo, Stendhal, Flaubert, etc.). Wei-Wei must not only break ties with her mother, but (re)learn language through three male instructors of Chinese origin, who themselves learned French by way of

French missionary and colonial institutions. She begins her formal French lessons in the third week, after her “vaccination politique.” Before being exposed to French, she must on the one hand, relinquish former aspirations and familial ties. Yet she must also protect herself against potential contamination from contact with a foreign language and culture.

In effect, Wei-Wei’s encounter with French and foreign literature is frequently described by metaphors of disease and contagion, food and consumption. Literature is an

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intoxicating drug with which she voluntarily “poisons” herself: “C’est la faute de ces drogues à l’arôme enivrant de l’amour absolu et du bonheur de l’individu dont je m’empoisonne le cerveau avec la plus grande joie du monde!” French literature is a virus transmitted through a key organ of language, the mouth and the tongue: “Dès la première gorgée, ça y est, j’attrape le virus […] je viens de découvrir une autre cuisine, très savoureuse elle aussi, qui me donne la force de supporter I’insupportable routine alimentaire du dimanche au réfectoire: la lecture simultanée.” Literature, both early twentieth-century Chinese fiction, and especially, Western literature is depicted as a delicious, but dangerous food to be consumed at one’s own risk.

The dual metaphor – literature as food, as joyful sustenance, and literature as poison, as virus – points to its dual capacity to nourish and to pollute. While it is tempting to read literature, and in particular French, as a carrier of abstract, positive values like liberty and individuality,424 I would argue that Wei-Wei presents us with a more ambiguous view in light of her foregrounding of the processes of translation. In her encounter with French language and literature, Wei-Wei is forced to (re)examine Chinese language and culture – an examination that, as we have seen, results in reductive stereotypes. More interesting than the stereotypes themselves is her complicity in creating them. That is, this is a virus that is desired and sought after, and that is spread and

424 “C’est le français, en effet, qui permet cette plus grande liberté : il lui donne une plus grande latitude stylistique puisqu’elle n’écrit pas dans sa langue maternelle (de quelle manière la latitude linguistique car on pourrait dire le contraire dans la mesure où justement ce n’est pas sa langue) ainsi qu’une plus grande distance, d’une part, avec les souvenirs qui lui permettent d’introduire de l’humour dans le récit de ces souvenirs douloureux, d’autre part avec la vie présente en Angleterre. C’est sûrement aussi parce que le français est la langue qui a construit l’individualité de Wei-Wei, comme nous le rapporte ce livre.” Cf. http://crdp.ac-paris.fr/parcours/index.php/category/weiwei

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transformed by translation in a process that reveals itself to be treacherous, but gainfully so:

Je prends un roman français et sa traduction chinoise que je pose côte à côte, et les compare phrase par phrase, paragraphe par paragraphe. Le premier plat que je goûte se compose du Père Goriot et de sa traduction par Fu Lei. Pendant plusieurs week-ends, je me regale. Ce qui me fascine le plus dans ce va-et-vient continu entre les deux langues, c’est que Fu Lei réussi à surmonter les insurmontables difficultés linguistiques, à faire éclater les contraintes formelles pour rendre la quintessence palpitante du texte, à transposer dans notre chinois la langue française avec ses images, ses symboles, son humour, ses allusions, ses sous- entendus … comme si Balzac avait écrit son roman directement en chinois.425

Here, she makes clear that a good translator, like Fu Lei, succeeds in making the original sound familiar to a foreign audience. More specifically, a good translator succeeds in capturing the spirit (“l’esprit”) of a text, much as a good painter expresses the spirit of an object:

Un peintre chinois se moque de la vérité du motif, de la ressemblance superficielle, donc vulgaire, de l’objet qu’il peint […] Il s’applique au contraire à exprimer l’esprit de l’objet qu’il choisit d’interpréter, à transmettre son souffle vital à partir du personnage, ce sont les traits typiques de l’animal ou de la plante susceptibles d’émouvoir, c’est la poésie des montagnes et des cours d’eau qui transcende les limites de l’espace-temps, c’est sa vision intérieure devant le paysage qui l’inspire … À sa façon, Fu Lei réalise dans la traduction littéraire ce que recherche un peintre chinois dans la peinture.426

This passage provides the reader with a useful key to reading translations, to reading this text, as well as the other novels in this chapter. It reminds us of Benjamin’s claim that the task of the translator “consists in finding that intended effect [Intentio] upon the language

425 Une Fille Zhuang, p. 187-188.

426 Ibid., p. 188.

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into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original,” 427 of translation as incorporating “the original’s mode of signification […] making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.”428 In other words, not only is difference desired and potentially assimilated, it is always already a part of the self.

As in Balzac, Une Fille Zhuang plays with cultural dichotomies only to dismantle them, ending on a highly ambivalent note. The novel concludes with a scene in the Jardin de Clarté in Beijing, an imperial garden ransacked by European powers during the Boxer

Rebellion. As Wei-Wei walks through the ruins of the garden, a bird defecates on her shoulder, and she wonders if the stain signifies “[une] bénédiction celeste” or “[un] avertissement du destin.” By ending with a reference to one of the most infamous acts of destruction and pillage by French and British forces during the Second Opium War, the novel resists being categorized as simply an ode to France and French literature. It neither focuses on victim suffering with the narrator’s eventual “escape” to the West, nor on the role of French as enabling her “emancipation” as a woman and as a writer, as the CDRP materials suggest. A history of imperialism and Third World struggle haunts the text, resisting its assimilation into the villain-victim, or “tragedy-triumph-freedom” narrative that seems to characterize so many Cultural Revolution memoirs. Yet the fact that this history is hidden between the lines, displaced by the plot of reading and self- actualization, reveals the extent to which anticolonial struggle has disappeared, as we saw in Chapter Three, from dominant revolutionary histories.

427 “The Task of the Translator” in Illuminations, p. 76.

428 Ibid., p. 78. 211

The Artist as Universal Witness in Le Dit de Tianyi

In contrast to Balzac and Une Fille Zhuang, François Cheng’s semi- autobiographical novel, Le Dit de Tianyi (hereafter, Tianyi) appears at first glance to transcend binary oppositions. The act of chronicling Tianyi’s story enables the narrator to join a very personal history with the traumatic collective history of a nation. In an interview with the newspaper Liberation, Cheng describes Tianyi as the intertwining of multiple personal histories – including his own personally lived experiences – and a collective historical experience:

Tout Chinois a un double sort, individuel et collectif. Pas un seul Chinois n'a échappé aux bouleversements qu'a connus le pays depuis le début du siècle […]Au-delà de cette accumulation d'itinéraires singuliers, il y a au centre du livre un drame d'amour et d'amitié, que j'ai vécu intimement et profondément. Le roman est fait de l'entrelacement de ce drame personnel et du drame collectif. 429

Because he was exiled in France during the Cultural Revolution, Cheng did not personally experience persecution or reeducation, but the love triangle and friendships he describes are based on actual relationships. Interestingly, Cheng describes the text as neither autobiography nor testimony, but the fictional dramatization of a collective history: “Ce n'est pas une autobiographie, ni un témoignage, mais la prise en charge romanesque d'une multiplicité de destins, sur deux générations. Le Dit de Tianyi est […]

429 Entretien avec François Cheng par Antoine de Gaudemar dans Liberation, 5 novembre 1998: http://www.liberation.fr/livres/1998/11/05/les-tribulations-d-un-chinois-en-chengpasseur-en-france-de-la- culture-chinoise-et-en-chine-de-la-poe_252678

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fait de tous ces récits.”430 On the one hand, he refuses the expectations of “truth” associated with autobiography and testimony. Yet, on the other, unlike Wei-Wei, he does not see personal history and History as standing in opposition to each other.

Published by Éditions Albin Michel in 1998 and recipient of that year’s Prix

Femina, Tianyi recounts a young Chinese artist’s quest to define himself and his destiny at the very moment China is struggling to determine its national identity. Spanning approximately sixty years from 1925 to 1982, the novel is set in the context of semi- colonialism, the Sino-Japanese war, civil war and revolution. Its three parts encompass pre-World War II China (“Épopée du départ"), post-World War II France (“Récit d’un détour") and Cultural Revolution China (“Mythe du retour”).431 The novel recounts the coming of age of the fictional Tianyi as related by a Paris-based narrator.

Born in 1925 in , Tianyi is forced to flee south during the Sino-Japanese War.

He settles for a time in Sichuan province where he develops an intimate friendship with

Haolang (“L’Ami”), a charismatic poet and future communist militant, and Yumei

(“L’Amante”), an actress Tianyi is enamored with, but who chooses Haolang. At the end of the Sino-Japanese war, Tianyi discovers a love for painting, and with the help of a mentor, prepares for a scholarship competition. In 1948, having obtained a grant to study painting in Paris, he sails for France where he spends decades in exile and poverty. Upon receiving an urgent letter from Yumei, Tianyi returns to China in 1957, and discovers that

Haolang has been denounced as a rightist and sent to a reeducation camp. By

430 Ibid.

431 These dates correspond roughly to Cheng’s actual birth in China in 1929, his departure for France on an art history scholarship in 1948, and his first visit to China in 1982 after decades of exile in Paris.

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passionately proclaiming the virtues of Western painting, Tianyi gets himself sent to the same camp in the frigid North; reunited with his friend for a time, Tianyi later witnesses the senseless interrogation and brutal stoning of Haolang when Red Guards take over the camp in 1968. Tianyi’s story is related in French by an anonymous narrator, a fellow

Chinese exile who met Tianyi in Paris in the 1950s, and who returns to China in 1982 to find Tianyi in a hospice, half-mad but keen to tell his story.

Tianyi in this way shares some traits with literary witness, including an urgent, moral compulsion to listen, record, and make public. In an interview about the writing of the novel, Cheng describes its provenance as the result of an intensive “écoute,” an ethical listening to the tales of survivors:

Au début des années 80, la plupart des Chinois qui débarquaient en France venaient me voir. Presque à la même époque, je suis tombé gravement malade, et je suis resté très longtemps couché, immobilisé dans mon lit, les yeux fixés au plafond. Ces exilés qui me rendaient visite avaient besoin de s'épancher. En dépit de mon désarroi, j'étais entièrement disponible et j'ai écouté, pendant des journées entières, à chaud, des dizaines et des dizaines de récits. Ce fut une période extraordinaire: comme je ne pouvais pas écrire, j'emmagasinais tous ces récits, ils se gravaient dans ma mémoire, souvent à la première personne. J'ai fini par connaître dans les moindres détails la vie dans les camps chinois, comment on mange et comment on dort, comment on travaille et comment on lutte contre le froid, la maladie. Le dit de Tianyi est un roman qui est fait de tous ces récits.432

In a similar manner, the narrator’s retelling of Tianyi’s story results from an intensive period of listening; he describes his decision to relate “le dit de Tianyi” as a difficult obligation: “En 1993 […] comme pour m’acquitter d’une dette, j’entrepris alors la rude tâche de reconstituer le récit dont j’avais la charge et de le transposer en français.”433

432 Entretien avec François Cheng par Antoine de Gaudemar dans Liberation, 5 novembre 1998.

433 Ibid., p. 11.

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Here, François Cheng constructs a series of storytelling relays, a mise-en-abime of survivors, witnesses and storytellers that foregrounds the dialogic relation between the reader and the text. Notably, Cheng and the narrator are not witnesses but the ones who bear witness for the witnesses. At the time of listening, Cheng has been silenced by his illness. He can do nothing but act as a silent ear, a mute vessel for the stories of others.

He is not an immediate eyewitness, but one who receives the story much later. Paralleling the process of reading, there is a lack of immediacy, a delay in time, and hence, perhaps, a greater chance for the stories to be adulterated, to change with time and perspective, or to be misinterpreted. On the one hand, this delay undermines the reliability of the narrative. On the other hand, the fact that the story is told with delay, and is an amalgam of multiple stories, adds to its power for it becomes more universal. It represents the experience of not just one individual but the collective trauma of a generation and of a nation. As such, the novel also holds the potential for collective healing – or the blockage of healing – through transference.

In his essay, “The Dynamics of Transference,” Freud identifies transference, or the redirection to a substitute (the therapist) of repressed emotions, as key to the relationship between psychoanalyst and patient. In redirecting his/her neuroses onto the psychoanalyst, the patient gains the potential to revise old scripts in collaboration with the listening other. This relationship of transference-neurosis in many ways resembles the relationship between reader and text. I would extend that resemblance to the relationship between witness and survivor. Cheng invites us to read his text through the lens of psychoanalytic transference through his evocation of the survivor (patient) who speaks, and the witness (psychoanalyst) who listens, records and (re)transmits. In the passage

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cited above, there is a curious reversal of the typical psychoanalyst – patient relationship:

Cheng is the one lying prostrate on the couch, "the patient" as opposed to the psychoanalyst who records and writes. That he later picks up his pen to write implies a collapse of distinction between patient and analyst, narrator and reader.

Told from the first person point of view, Tianyi conspicuously blurs distinctions between the author, narrator, protagonist, and reader. After introducing Tianyi’s story, how he came to hear of it, and why he wishes to tell it in a five-page avant-propos, the narrator removes himself from the story, letting Tianyi’s voice carry the novel for over

400 pages until the final five pages, where the reader witnesses Tianyi witnessing

Haolang’s persecution:

Je vois les interrogatoires collectifs sur la place avec les accusés assis en rangs, sur un long banc, face à tous les groupes de Gardes rouges rassemblés […] L’Ami devient la cible de choix des révolutionnaires […] on le voit seul, debout devant la foule […]434

After Tianyi watches the Red Guards stoning Haolang to death, the narrator once again becomes the witness, the seeing eye (I). Suddenly, the “je vois” switches to the voice of the narrator:

Je vois Tianyi; je me vois – mais celui que je vois est-il encore moi-même? […] Je vois Tianyi, tordu de douleur à l’estomac et aux intestins, transporté au dispensaire du bourg […] Enfin, je vois Tianyi transporté par camion militaire jusqu’à une immense bâtisse, genre d’asile pour malades mentaux et handicapés physiques, dans la ville de S. À partir de là, il devient anonyme.435

After Tianyi is transported to an unnamed asylum outside of Paris, the final few pages of the novel then shifts from first to third person and free indirect speech:

434 Le dit de Tianyi, p. 407-408.

435 Ibid., p. 401. 216

En restituant morceau par morceau les événements d’une existence, cet être nommé Tianyi, si banal, si singulier, finit par permettre au courant d’une eau vive de relier ses parties séparées, lesquelles étaient en réalité d’un seul tenant […] S’avançant dans l’écriture, il est tout d’un coup frappé par une certitude. Certitude qu’en dépit de tout la vraie vie, intacte, demeure là […] ce qui pourrait arriver ne serait-il pas aussi réel que ce qui est effectivement arrivé? Effectivement arrivé? Qui pourrait en être sûr maintenant, tant les choses semblent par moments embrouillées? […] Que sait-il au juste de lui-même? Sait-il qu’à l’origine, sans la rencontre des trois personnes, il n’y aurait pas eu de destin? Mais combien de fois il lui arrive de se demander si ces trois personnes, une fois rencontrées, se sont jamais séparées – Tianyi est-il jamais parti et revenu? Yumei a-t-elle jamais quitté ce monde? Haolang s’est-il jamais perdu dans la contrée de l’extremité? Ne serait- il pas prêt à croire quelqu’un qui viendrait lui suggérer que tout cela peut-être n’a été qu’imaginé?436

By reconstituting “morceau par morceau” the events of Tianyi’s life, and by translating his tale into French, the narrator enables Tianyi’s story to circulate to a wider audience where it can join the universal “souffle,” the greater vessel, of which this one experience is a mere fragment. The novel creates a space where “la souffrance particulière de chacun rejoint la souffrance universelle.”437 That is, it creates a space for remembering and mourning. Again, paralleling the process of transference described by Freud in

“Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” the text thus acts as “an intermediate region [Zwischenreich] between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention.” 438 If we replace the word illness with “fictional dramatization of trauma,”

436 Ibid., p. 411-412.

437 Ibid., p. 398.

438 Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of , ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol 12, p. 154. Cited in Peter 217

we have an apt description for Cheng’s writing process in Le dit de Tianyi. Our intervention” in turn evokes the (re)writing and (re)transmission undertaken by Tianyi, the narrator, François Cheng – as well as that to be undertaken by the reader.

While, in contrast with Balzac and Une Fille Zhuang, Tianyi more explicitly details the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and China’s political convulsions over the course of the twentieth century in contrast with Balzac and Une Fille Zhuang, it too displaces the political nature of such struggles onto a coming-of-age story about self- development, friendship and romantic love. Once again, political content and class struggle have been evacuated in favor of an ethical endeavor to bear witness to violations of human rights. But if Tianyi dovetails with best-selling Anglophone scar literature, it departs from them in its ambivalent embrace of life in the West. In a revelatory scene, at a party in Paris, at “un de ces salons qui se targuaient d’avoir l’esprit ouvert,” where everyone seems to be an expert on Chinese thought, art, and culture, Tianyi realizes, “il faudrait désormais que je m’applique à être chinois, à me conformer à l’idée qu’on se fait d’un Chinois.”439 This reference to the alienating gaze of the other and the necessity of translating oneself in conformity to the other’s gaze complicates the transcendence of dichotomies and past suffering hinted at earlier.

Although François Cheng is today something of an emblem of successful cultural hybridity, given his awareness of what is expected of him as a spokesperson for Chinese culture in France, one suspects that championing hybridity may not transcend reductive

Brooks, “The Idea of a Psychoanalytic .” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Winter 1987), p. 342.

439 LDT, p. 199.

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cultural differences so much as reinforce them. Already well-known in France by the late nineties for his poetry, calligraphy, essays on Chinese painting and poetry, and his translations of classical Chinese poems, Cheng was elected to the Académie française in

2002, partially for his successful “marriage” of French and Chinese culture, two cultures which, as we have seen elsewhere, have historically been viewed as diametrically opposed. Cheng, whose parents were among the first students to be sent to study in the

U.S., and whose father helped to found UNESCO, is representative of an elite, mandarin

Chinese culture that has—for French sinologists at least—become a metonym of traditional Chinese culture in general.

Conclusion: The Cultural Revolution Novel in a Transnational Post-Socialist Age

In my readings of three of the most prominent Francophone Cultural Revolution novels, I have demonstrated how revolutionary political content and class struggle have been elided in coming-of-age stories that stage transformations of the self through an encounter with the "other," and in the case of Le Dit de Tianyi, an ethical endeavor to bear witness. In each instance, mirroring the content of the Romantic and Realist French novels being read by the protagonists during their reeducations, emphasis is accorded to the individual and his/her process of self-discovery through the consumption of foreign tales, or through travel and transculturation. The Cultural Revolution serves as mere backdrop in these novels, and although we hear very little about it in the space of the texts themselves, it plays an extremely important role in the marketing and reception of these works. They are marketed as survivor tales of the Cultural Revolution, in some

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cases explicitly as examples of "scar literature," even though the authors deny any such intentions, and although, as I have shown, the texts operate on a very different internal logic. In contrast, a preliminary perusal of readers' blogs and online FNAC and Amazon book reviews reveals a readerly interest in the extraordinary power of the "human spirit", the authors' passion for reading, and the romantic love stories within the texts. These tensions between how the works are publicized, how the authors themselves conceive of their texts, and how readers read the texts reflect two contradictory contemporary tendencies: on the one hand, the ongoing legacy of Cold War ideology to separate the world into "bad Communists" and "good liberal democrats," "victims of the Cultural

Revolution" and "perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution," and on the other, the transnational post-socialist tendency to depoliticize content in favor of an entertaining, universal human interest story.

In contrast to the official CCP narrative about the Cultural Revolution corroborated by Chinese scar literature of the 1970s and 1980s, Francophone accounts of the Chinese Cultural Revolution do not adhere to a strict victim-villain dichotomy.

Neither do they convey a "tragedy-triumph-freedom" narrative based on the intractable opposition between an oppressive, socialist China and a free, capitalist West, as best- selling Anglophone memoirs written by Chinese diasporic writers in the late 1980s and

1990s tend to do. Rather, the political struggle has been elided, and displaced onto a focus on cultural differences, particularly linguistic and literary differences. That is, class struggle has been obscured in favor of a kind of "clash of civilizations" for which the battleground is not so much national identity as individual self-actualization, and whose outcome is not as determined as – and because of the potential for transcultural

220

collaboration and complicity – also less hostile than Samuel Huntington's problematic thesis. This displacement is enabled in part by the fact that the French language is portrayed as the language of emancipation, effectively bracketing out its colonial history as a language of domination.

Moreover, the displacement parallels a historical shift from the ideologically polarized politics of the Cold War to a transnational post-socialism that disavows political and class struggle starting in the early 1990s with the dissolution of the Soviet

Union. In contrast to the polarized world depicted in the earlier Cultural Revolution literature, these Francophone novels written at the turn of the twenty-first century demonstrate an increasing depoliticization in line with the ideology of transnational capital, and the emergence of the "ethical turn," whereby revolution is abandoned in favor of an emphasis on human rights and individual liberty. As I argue in Chapter Three, this

“turn to ethics” is less of a true shift than a disassociation of rights and revolution that obscures the originary link between the two.

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CONCLUSION

By attending to the interwovenness of the French and Chinese Revolutions over the course of the twentieth century, I hope to have shown that mis/translation was critical to the articulation of not only revolutionary discourses and practices, but to shaping the historical contexts in which those discourses and practices were produced.

Translation in this sense does not refer simply to a setting up of linguistic ‘equivalences’, or to a metaphor for cultural (ex)change, but rather encompasses a broad array of practices – rhetorical strategies, tropes, discursive formations, and so forth – that draw upon diverse sources and overlapping “worlds of thinking.” While these translingual practices are reciprocal and syncretic, negotiating between different worldviews and agendas, they are nevertheless carried out under conditions of geopolitical inequality. In the twentieth century, there were several significant shifts in the global world order that led to these conditions – most notably, the rise of Euro-American (especially British and

American) dominance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

At the turn of the 1900s, a Chinese empire plagued by nearly half a century of costly foreign conflicts, natural disasters, and internal rebellions (sparked by both internal dislocations and imported foreign ideologies) gave way, over the course of several wars and revolutions, to a republic (1912), that was briefly restored to a monarchy (1913), then torn by civil war (1927-1937; 1946-1949), and finally, split into two separate nation- states: the communist People’s Republic of China led by Mao Zedong (1949), and the nationalist Republic of China in Taiwan established by Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek).

The revolutionary “awakening” of Qing imperial subjects, and later, Chinese citizens, to

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their country’s weaknesses on the global stage440, and the subsequent drive to strengthen and save China that led to the overthrow of the Qing, the New Culture and May Fourth movements, and competing political parties, were in no small part driven by the translation and regular discussions of texts such as T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics,

Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics, and Rousseau’s Social Contract, which were among the most widely read and influential texts in Chinese intellectual circles in the early twentieth century.441

Classically trained late Qing intellectuals such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao articulated radical solutions based on both classical Confucian traditions, and new

Western ideas such as social Darwinism. In the first chapter, I examined how the transvaluation of the classical Chinese concept of revolution, geming, through Sino-

European-Japanese translations of the French Revolution set the stage for the 1911

Revolution, as well as for an emergent rights discourse that later fed into radical ideologies, including, most importantly, anarchism. I argued that anarchism was an important mode of translation in this period; it provided not only a powerful vocabulary for interpreting the contemporary world, but a set of revolutionary practices such as combining labor and learning through the Sino-French Diligent Work-Frugal Study program. Anarchism in this period was critical to the invention of a unique revolutionary discourse that attempted to negotiate between a race-based nationalism, and a socialist internationalism.

440 On the trope of awakening in late Qing China, see John Fitzgerald’s Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998.

441 Pollard, David, ed. Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1998.

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I subsequently juxtaposed the Orientalist travel writing of Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva on Chinese women with the anarcho-feminist political essays of He-

Yin Zhen to show that Chinese feminism is not a derivative of Western feminism, or of

Communism, for that matter, but offers a radical transnational rethinking of gender and social relations in general. The benevolent, or leftist Orientalism of Beauvoir and

Kristeva was part of a larger trend of French Maoism, which I show in a later chapter to be not merely a construction of French intellectuals, but the product of a vast propaganda and translation project initiated by Mao and the CCP. Finally, I argue that the emergence and popularity of Francophone literature on the Cultural Revolution both reflects and reinforces a radical shift in thinking about revolution in general and the Cultural

Revolution in particular, in both China and France following the end of the Cold War.

Revolution, largely dismissed by dominant historiographies as a failure to be avoided, is noticeably absent in these semi-autobiographical novels about life during the Cultural

Revolution. I argue that revolution is displaced in these novels in favor of a plot that focuses on romantic adventure, entertainment (through reading French literature), and individual self-actualization – all values promoted by an evolving transnational consumer culture.

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