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Deng Xiaoping: The Years in France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Nora Wang
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Deng Xiaoping has been the subject of several biographies, most of which contain little information about the leader's “French” period. Yet the five years he spent in France cannot be passed over in silence, for it was there and during that time that he first became active politically and joined the Chinese Communist Party. These facts are not in dispute, but the episode as a whole has been illuminated only briefly and in contradictory ways. According to Boorman, for example, “Deng, after attending classes in a special preparatory school in Chengdu […] went to Shanghai, and thence to Europe early in 1920. […] There is no record of Deng's having attended classes at any school or university in France; nor is it clear what type of work he did there.” As far as Boorman is concerned, Deng's stay in France was marked only by his joining the local branch of the CCP and by his (purely technical) activities as a roneographer for Chiguang. On the basis of Soviet sources and of comments made by Deng himself to Edgar Snow, D. W. Klein and A. B. Clark supply further details. Deng Xiaoping, they tell us, was involved in the Chinese worker-student movement in Lyon in 1921; he joined the Chinese Communist Youth in 1922 and the Party in 1924. Some time after that he left France for Moscow: in 1926, according to Klein and Clark, while Boorman puts his departure in the previous year. The Chinese texts available until recently are scarcely more helpful. A famous biographical note put out by the Red Guards informed us, for example, that Deng joined the party in 1925! According to this document

Type
Research Note
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 92 , December 1982 , pp. 698 - 705
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1982

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References

1. Notably those of Zhou, Xun (ed.), Deng Xiaoping (Hong Kong, 1979)Google Scholar; Hsin, Chi, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, A Political Biography (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books Ltd. 1978)Google Scholar; and the work of the Japanese authors Takeshi, Wada and Nobuichi, Tanaka, Chinese version: Deng Xiaoping chuan (Hong Kong, 1981).Google Scholar

2. Boorman, H. L. (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, Vol. III (Columbia, 1970), pp. 252–53.Google Scholar

3. In fact Deng, together with a whole group from Sichuan, embarked for France aboard the Porthos in November 1920; cf. Yunhou, Zhang et al. , Liufa qingong jianxue yundong (Shanghai, 1980).Google Scholar

4. Published in Paris from February 1924, the review Chiguang (Red Light) replaced Shaonian (Youth) as the organ of the European section of the CCP.

5. In Random Notes on Red China (1957).Google Scholar

6. Klein, Donald W., and Clark, Anne B. (eds.) Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism 1921–1965, Vol. II, (Harvard, 1971), pp. 820–21.Google Scholar

7. In the wake of the international agreement reached after the First World War regarding the use of the Boxer indemnity, it was decided that the fund should be allocated to educational work. One notable result was the creation of a Franco–Chinese Institute in Lyon, for which the French and Chinese authorities together selected a group of students in China. When the Institute opened in 1921, and even before the selected students arrived, Chinese students already in France demanded to be admitted. Led by Communist militants, they occupied the Institute. The Mobile Guard was called in, and the affair culminated in the expulsion of 104 of them without a formal order by the Ministry of the Interior.

8. Translated in Révo. cul. dans la Chine pop. (Paris, 1974), p. 275.Google Scholar

9. Notably the material preserved at the Archives Nationales, namely documents of the Ministry of the Interior (F7 12 900, “Communism in China and Germany 1920–1925,” and F713 438, “Chinese in France 1914–1927”) and records of the former Colonial Ministry.

10. The problem of Deng's “true” surname has given rise to some discussion, certain authors claiming – possibly on the authority of Li Huang, whose memoirs were published in Taipei in 1973 – that the xing of Deng Xiaoping is actually Kan. One wonders, however, whether there was not some confusion on Li Huang's part. The same group of students included a “Kan Shijie,” who moreover is mentioned in the records of the French police.

11. According to Yunhou, Zhang, op. cit.Google Scholar the Porthos reached Marseilles on 13 December.

12. On the subject of this movement of “hard work” and “frugal study,” which prompted many young Chinese to make the trip to Europe and in particular to France in 1920 and 1921 in the hope of studying while working, see Yunhou, Zhang, op. cit.Google Scholar and also Fufa gingong jianxue yundong shiliao (Beijing, 1979–1982), 3 vols.Google Scholar

13. The entry number is 140.

14. Archives on the Chinese worker-students in France (1920–40) kept at the Centre de Recherches et de Documentation sur la Chine contemporaine of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. B/6–10.

15. Declaration at Montargis Town Hall, Municipal Records, register of aliens, 1922.

16. See note 7, supra. If Deng did take part in this movement, it was no doubt discreetly; with one or two exceptions (including the Communist leader Zhao Shiyan), the students most “involved” were in fact deported.

17. Montargis Municipal Records.

18. This stay is known only from the declaration Deng made on leaving Montargis. Châtillon-sur-Seine is a small town near Dijon.

19. Hutchinson records, register of employees, 1923.

20. Ibid.; and Montargis Municipal Records. La Garenne-Colombes is a south-western suburb of Paris.

21. Archives Nationales (A.N.), F7 12 900 and F7 13 438.

22. Ibid.

23. This is not, of course, by any means a rule, as witness the case of Zhou Enlai, the man chiefly responsible for the European branch of the CCP and the European branch of the Guomindang until he left France in the summer of 1924; the police were very slow in spotting him, not initiating enquiries into his activities until January 1925! Cf. A.N. F7 12 900.

24. See note 4, supra.

25. The Archives Nationales have at least two tracts dated June 1925 for which Deng made the stencils.

26. A.N. F7 12 900.

27. According to documents seized in late 1926 aboard a ship on the Marseilles-Shanghai line (Colonial Ministry Records).

28. A.N. F7 13 438.

29. A political cadre in the Red Army in the thirties, Fu Zhong was close to Zhang Guotao. He eventually became an admirer of Mao Zedong at Yan'an and directed the political departmental Kangda. He was a high-ranking PL A cadre in the fifties and sixties. As for his departure from France, see his account in Beijing wanbao (Peking Evening Daily), 28 06 1981.Google Scholar

30. A.N. F7 13 438.

31. A.N.F7 12900.

32. Leader of the European branch of the Guomindang, the tubercular Wang Jingqi was very close to the CCP though he never became a member; in spite of his illness, which ruled out any active participation, he was deported in the aftermath of the demonstration of June 1925.

33. A.N. F7 12900.

34. Ibid.

35. A.N. F7 13 438.

36. This committee, the “Comité d'Action des Groupes Chinois en France,” also known as the “Comité d'Action des Chinois en France pour soutenír le Mouvement Antiimpérialiste de Shanghai,” was set up on 7 June 1925 at the instigation of the Communists to support the 30 May Movement.

37. Feng Yuxiang had just turned his army against his former ally Zhang Zuolin, who for his part was in the pay of Japan.

38. A.N. F7 12 900.

39. For a more detailed account of the event and its aftermath, see my forthcoming study of the “Da Chen Lu: the ‘30 May 1925’ Movement in Paris.” The leader of the demonstration, Ren Zhuoxuan, left the CCP in 1927 or 1928. Using the pen-name Ye Qing, he became a noted anti-Mao theorist in the thirties, and ultimately a leading Guomindang propagandist.

40. A police observer, however, estimated from his appearance that he was “about twenty-three,” which is astonishing in view of a famous photograph taken in Paris in 1921, showing some of the members of the French section of the Communist Youth League (reproduced in Zhongguo xinminzhuzhuyi geming shiqi tongshi (General History of the Period of the Chinese New Democratic Revolution). (Beijing, 1962)Google Scholar, new edition 1980, Vol. 1).

41. Police report of 8 January 1926 (A.N. F7 13 438).

42. The deportation order relating to them is dated 18 January 1926 and figures in the descriptive lists for the year with the words “to be notified”; cf. A.N. F7 14 655, “General alphabetical index of deported aliens 1925–1928.”

43. i.e. members of the CCP proper or of the Communist Youth League.

44. Cf. the information about Zhou Enlai in Tianjin wenshi ziliao xuanji (Selected Materials on Tianjin Literature and History) (Tianjin, 1981).Google Scholar

45. The question of the relationship between the Chinese and French Communist parties in particular raises many problems. The French Communists, who through their colonial section had a distant interest in the first Chinese Communists, did assist the latter on a number of occasions, notably at the time of their initial formation and by providing legal help after the 1925 affair, but there is very little information available regarding the effective importance of that assistance and how it found expression.

46. The modest scope of this reading matter must be seen in the light not only of the poverty of these men but also of the fact that they were not permanent agents; even if they all, like it or not, experienced periods of unemployment, they mostly worked in factories. The large library seized at the home of Ren Zhuoxuan at 18 rue de Bièvre after the June 1925 affair was an exception.

47. If for many militants France appears to have represented a kind of “waiting-room” for the U.S.S.R., in some cases this was a mark of discipline: not a few Chinese Communists do not seem to have been eager to obey the directive to return to China via the U.S.S.R., dated April 1923.