"I don’t believe in a Chinese model" , interview with Lucien Bianco
(This is an interview realized by a Chinese journalist whose pen name is Pang Guanzhe with the help of professor Lun ZHANG in May 2020)
Pang: Why were you interested in communism during college? At that time, what did you know about the Soviet Union and China?
L.B.: I was not interested in communism, but in so-called “overpopulated and underdeveloped” countries. I for a while hesitated between studying China or India, but quickly chose China, where a revolution had recently occurred.
When I began to study Chinese in 1953, I knew next to nothing on China and Chinese civilization. I learnt more on Soviet Union a few years later for the only reason that one of the ten questions I had to learn in order to become professor of history was “Russia from 1881 to 1928”. That was not a permanent topic to study, it just happened to be part of the program of the “aggregation of history” when I needed to concur.
Pang: You visited China twice in 1954 and 1973, and met Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. What impression did you get on your two trips to China? How does it affect your personal thoughts?
L.B.: The first visit in 1954 was organized by the “Sino-French Friendship Association”. As a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS, shifan daxue, or gaodeng shifan xuexiao), the geographer Jean Dresch, President of the Association, wished to include into the delegation a student of the ENS. He trusted the philosopher and professor at the ENS Louis Althusser with the task of choosing that student. Althusser chose me because I was the only ENS student learning Chinese –as a first-year student, I knew at most 600 characters. Most of the 26 members of the delegation -16 communists, and 10 non-communists, mostly left-wing including myself- were well-known writers, artists and intellectuals. That may explain why we met Zhou Enlai, who kindly reconstructed his reminiscences of France in the early 1920s, before briefly shaking hands with President Mao.
Utterly ignorant of Chinese politics, I relied on minute incidents to forge my own impression. While I was venturing into a Beijing hutong, an old lady invited me to visit her apartment. This contrasted with our short stay in Moscow, where Russian speaking historian Roger Portal had attempted to engage conversation with a Russian woman, who hastened to leave, presumably out of fear of being seen speaking with a foreigner. Later on our trip, a snow storm made us wait for over two days at Irkutsk’s airport. We eventually decided to walk on the road leading to the city, but were soon ordered back to the airport. I myself came back from China dreaming it would host a freer and more humane socialism than the cold Soviet model.
The second visit (in 1974, not 1973) could not be more different. In 1954, all I knew was a few Chinese words, and I looked for a more promising socialism, one year after Stalin’s death. By 1974 I was quite disturbed by what I had read about the Great Leap Forward, the famine, and the Cultural Revolution. Rather than a student lost among famous Parisian figures, I was a China specialist entrusted by the director of the ENS with the task of teaching contemporary Chinese history to the twenty or so ENS students visiting China along with himself and myself. On quite a few occasions, my unorthodox explanations made our Luxingshe interpreter quite unhappy. During one of our first evenings in Beijing, two Luxingshe officials asked me to return to them pictures of the Pi Lin Pi Kong campaign slogans I had taken during the same morning at Beijing Number Three Textile Factory. I replied that we had asked whether we could film and take pictures, and obtained a positive response from the vice-President of the revolutionary Committee. They replied: “you obtained that permission from the authorities, but unlike in France the working masses are the true masters here, and they want to check the pictures you took”. Other incidents during the trip made Luxingshe officials so suspicious of me that custom officials retained me one and half hour at the border in Shenzhen looking for neibu documents I might have stolen or obtained from unsuspecting Chinese.
Back to France, I was convoked by the director of the ENS, who abruptly told me that I was free to indulge in the fancy of sawing the branch I was sitting on, but not to harm the ENS. In other words the ENS was my danwei, and the Chinese embassy’s cultural attaché had expressed his discontent at two critical articles I published in Le Monde following our visit to China. My criticisms would look rather mild and commonplace today, but Le Monde had declined to publish the most critical article, which I eventually succeeded in publishing in the monthly Esprit. It described the ways Luxingshe and more generally Chinese authorities impeded the visitor to have any meaningful contact with the Chinese people. As for the impression our 1974 visit made on me, it confirmed my worries about the evolution of the Maoist regime.
Pang: In the 1960s and 1970s, why did many French intellectuals have a good opinion about China and even support the “Cultural Revolution”? What kind of historical lesson is worth learning today?
L. B.: During our 1974 visit my comments quite often offended the majority of my travel companions, the ENS students. My job consisted in making China less unfamiliar to them, but how could they reconcile my explanations with those of the Luxingshe interpreter, not to mention the many speeches given by officials prior to each visit of a kindergarten, a factory, or a city from Anshan in the North-East to Luoyang and Guangzhou? My travel companions were representative of the numerous French intellectuals who admired President Mao and the Cultural Revolution. They did so because they had been disappointed by the Soviet Union, which Mao criticized, and desperately hoped that the true revolutionary spirit would be preserved and blossom in China. A more decisive reason was their ignorance of what was going on in China: they hastened to believe Maoist propaganda without taking care of looking for serious information, which was then easily accessible. I am not proud of my countrymen, too often eager to conclude prior learning, or is this a cultural characteristic of Latin countries, as Italy and Spain were similarly affected, whereas a larger majority of leftist intellectuals in northern European countries and the US resisted Maoist idolatry?
Pang: In 1967, you published Les Origines de la révolution chinoise, which is your famous work and has a huge impact. Half a century later, how would you rate this book? How do you evaluate the Chinese revolution in the first half of the 20th century ?
L.B.: After criticizing my countrymen, it’s time to criticize myself. Origins of the Chinese Revolution has become much more out of date than is often assumed. In the fourth updated and enlarged edition (Gallimard 2007, not translated by Stanford U.P.) I devoted a fifteen page postscript (pp. 305-320) to point out my main disagreements with what I originally wrote in 1966. The origins of the revolution go back not to 1915, but at least to 1900; my book exaggerated the significance of May Fourth and unduly privileged the radical part of its posterity, was too critical of the Nanjing regime, not enough of the CCP, etc. For the 2007 edition I almost completely re-wrote Chapter 1, the most deficient in the original edition, and added a lot to the much too systematic Chapter 5. Such changes are far from sufficient, as every page, every paragraph needs corrections due to the accumulated progress of historical knowledge during the past half-century.
My 2007 corrections were insufficient. To give just two instances of such deficiencies, Chapter 2 links May Fourth with the XVIIIth century protagonists of Enlightenment, not with its XIXth century critics, and Chapter 7, which is much to brief on the Yan’an episode, ignores Gao Hua’s very important work How the Red Sun Rose (then published in Chinese, unknown from me) and therefore the fateful rectification movement.
Pang: You have studied Chinese peasants all your life. What are the characteristics of Chinese peasants? What role did they play in the Chinese revolution?
L.B.: I share Paul Cohen’s “China-centered” approach, and therefore consider the poverty of pre-revolutionary peasant masses to be a basic “endogenous” social cause of the Chinese revolution. I nevertheless believe that anti-imperialist nationalism has been the main revolutionary ferment throughout the XXth century. National humiliation, not peasant poverty, turned many young intellectuals toward revolution. They achieved victory in the revolution with the help of peasants. By themselves peasants would not have undertaken a revolution, nor could they achieve it. Rather few peasants -mostly young- spontaneously, even enthusiastically enrolled under the Communist banner, more enrolled by interest, because they valued the social policies conducted in the base areas, even more may have merely obeyed orders.
I less abruptly expressed, discussed and documented such themes in the concluding chapter of my research on XXth century spontaneous peasant movements. See Lucien Bianco, with the collaboration of Hua Chang-Ming, Jacqueries et revolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle, Paris, Editions de La Martinière, 2005, chapter 17, pp. 429-455.
Pang: Since 1978, China experienced rapid economic growth, and has become the world's second largest economy. Some believed this is the result of the “Chinese model.” In your opinion, is there a “Chinese model”? Is it possible for China to embark on a unique modernization path?
L.B.: I don’t believe in a “Chinese model”. I am inclined to suspect those dreaming of a “unique modernization path” to harbor nostalgic memories of the uniqueness of Chinese civilization under the sky (tianxia). It would be a pity that the humiliations inflicted on China by imperialist countries (including my own) during a century provoke a resurgence of proud nationalism now that China has become strong.
Pang: Is it possible for the China Communist Party to lead China to complete the modernization transformation and become a modern democratic country? Is it possible for the China Communist Party to transform into a modern political party?
L.B.: The CCP has proven able to adapt and change, it may for a while continue to modernize China, but I don’t trust it to complete that transformation, even less to make China democratic. It’s not a question of ability: the CCP does not want democracy. Nor do I trust the CCP to transform into a modern political party.
Pang: Is it possible for China to surpass the US and become the world's largest economy?
L.B.: I believe, it is possible for China to surpass the US and become the world’s largest economy. Not certain, difficult to achieve, but definitely possible. If China succeeds, income per capita will remain much lower than in four times less populated US. May both countries then become less unequal!
Pang: What are your expectations for China's future?
L.B.: As long as the CCP retains absolute power, I don’t expect much change. China could go on occupying and militarizing reefs in Southern China Seas, and claiming to represent the modernization model for underdeveloped, mostly African countries. The communist regime is fairly stable, and will in any case much outlast me.
In the long term no regime stays forever, and a growing number of educated urban middle-class citizens –more than my dear peasants- may eventually become fed up with the dictatorship, even though the latter has enabled them to raise their income. That seems a crazy act of faith, but who would have predicted in the early or mid-1980s the fall of Soviet Union within less than a decade? Likewise, who would have predicted in 1976 or 1978 the unprecedented economic development sustained by China during the next four decades? My hopes relating to (distant) politics may be excessive, and we cannot exclude the possibility of the current regime being replaced by another, possibly worse, kind of dictatorship. On the other hand, we can quite safely predict further economic progress, even if the growth per year cannot remain at the same astonishing level once a country has become rich.
I would hope or wish -rather than expect- a more prestigious and useful future for China, namely a strong, democratic China leading the world in a way quite opposite to the “China dream” professed by Xi Jingping.
Lucien Bianco, born in 1930, is a French historian and sinologist specializing in Chinese modern history, “a great scholar” (Ezra F. Vogel). He is the author of a reference book on the origins of the Chinese revolution and has co-edited the book China in the twentieth century. His Peasants without the Party was awarded the Association for Asian Studies Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 2003. In 2014, he published another important book to compare the two biggest communist revolution in China and in Russia in the 20th century, La Récidive. Révolution russe, révolution chinoise.