Question About Simon Leys/Pierre Ryckmans

H-Asia Question about Simon Leys/Pierre Ryckmans

Discussion published by Nicholas Clifford on Friday, September 4, 2015

Sorry if this is going to the wrong place, but it's the sort of relatively simple question that it was possible to ask on H-ASIA in its earlier incarnation. Is this the appropriate place to put it? and if not, where should I try? Many thanks.

I'm trying to find out exactly when "Simon Leys" was publically identified as "Pierre Ryckmans," at the time of his arguments with a powerful group of French academic Maoists. His Habits neufs du président Mao (The Chairman’s New Clothes) a chronicle of the Cultural Revolution, written in Hong Kong and based on the Chinese press and other sources) came out in France in 1971. Then, after a stay of six months in Beijing attached to the new Belgian embassy, he wrote Ombres chinoises (Chinese Shadows) which appeared in 1974. In 1975-76 he had a tussle with the French scholar Michelle Loi, whose primary interest lay in Lu Xun (whom Leys admired enormously, as he did George Orwell). In 1976 she published (in Switzerland) a brief pamphlet called Pour Luxun: réponse à Pierre Ryckmans (For Lu Xun: reply to Pierre Ryckmans) attacking him and his views on China and linking him to reactionary circles in American China studies, and those Americans who (she says) actually preferred Zhou Zuoren (Lu Xun’s collaborationist brother) to Lu Xun himself. She herself, though admitting the problems the CCP gave Lu Xun prior to his death in 1936, managed to put the blame not on Mao and the Maoists, but on Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Yang, and some of the others who were disgraced during the Cultural Revolution, and had not yet been rehabilitated at the time of her writing.

But it’s not clear to me exactly to what Michelle Loi was replying when she wrote in 1975. Was she the person who first revealed Leys to be Ryckmans? Did he then write something about her and her scholarship? And if so, when? In 1971, a group of French China scholars (the historian Jean Chesneaux among them) managed to block any sort of a French university appointment for Leys/Ryckmans, so presumably the news was out by then. Was Loi one of the blockers? I don’t know. Leys in any case wrote a strong (and very funny) response to her in his Images Brisées (Broken Images, but for some reason it’s not in the English translation) which came out a year later. (He identifies her as a maoiste, but says she didn't have very far to travel, having earlier been a stalinienne).

This is obviously not a life or death question, but if anyone has a simple answer, I'd be grateful for it.

Many thanks,

Nicholas Clifford

College emeritus professor of history

Middlebury College, Vermont

Citation: Nicholas Clifford. Question about Simon Leys/Pierre Ryckmans. H-Asia. 09-04-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/discussions/80748/question-about-simon-leyspierre-ryckmans Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Asia