Translating Revolution in Twentieth-Century China and France Diana King Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Diana King All rights 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 other’s revolutions during critical moments of political and cultural crisis (the 1911 Revolution, the May Fourth Movement (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 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 Chinese national identity to articulating women’s rights to thinking about radical emancipation in an era of decolonization. While there have been isolated studies on the influence of the French Revolution in early twentieth-century China, and the impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the development of French Maoism 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 intellectuals 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 modernity were debated through the recurring circulation of translations (and retranslations) of ideas such as “democracy”, “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 society 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 Feminisms ........................................................................ 87 3. La Chinoise II: Translating Mao Zedong Thought and the Cult of Mao ................... 126 4. Revolution in Retrospect: The Francophone Cultural Revolution Novel .................. 176 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 222 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 225 ABBREVIATIONS CCP Chinese Communist Party CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet 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 (Taiwan) UCFML Union communiste français marxiste-léniniste UEC Union des étudiants communistes français UJCml Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes ii 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 being literally suspended between languages (English, Chinese), between countries (U.S., China), and between cultures. I found myself in Paris, 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 iii 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. iv 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. v INTRODUCTION Translating Revolution Evoking the language of the French Revolution, Karl Marx 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-conservatism, 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 liberty, 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 imperialism 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 Socialism” in The Global Ramifications of the French Revolution, Joseph Klaits and Michael H. Haltzel, eds. Princeton and Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 177-194, p. 177. 1 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