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giant dams, expressways, large-scale forestry felling, with 'appropriate technologies' better adjusted to the natural and social environment? How to check the power and influence of foreign technicians indifferent to local problems? How to control the abysmal growth of destitute shanty towns? These basic problems of China have become the problems of Amazonia, South Asia, Black Africa, Melanesia. The interests of some Parisian intellectuals may have shifted elsewhere, but other intellectuals have remained deeply concerned with the relevance, or the irrelevance, of our Western model of development for less affluent countries. In a recent book dealing with the problems of development, Edgard Pisani, a French intellectual who is also a former French High Commissioner in New Caledonia, has compared the energy gains offered by a large-scale modern dam with the energy savings of 5,000 peasant earthenware stoves. His point is this: these 5,000 stoves are very cheaply produced and they save the heat otherwise wasted when the kettle was just put on stones; these stoves compare very favourably in terms of energy gains with the expensive dam built by transnational corporations under the supervision of highly-paid foreign experts. Pisani is a moderate social democrat. He never indulged in radical Maoism. Yet his argument clearly amounts to a posthumous and quite unexpected validation of some basic themes of the Great Leap Forward thirty years ago.
From Watteau paintings and the Pompadour festivities to peasant stoves in Black Africa, from the Confucian mirage of the eighteenth century to the Maoist mirage of the twentieth century, from Victor Hugo's maledictions against Anglo-French vandalism in Peking to the Gaullian joint celebration of France de toujours and Chine de toujours, from the Philosophes' appeal to China against the tyranny of the old monarchy to the New Radicals' appeal to China against the tyranny of the Western model of development, the story of Sino-French intellectual relations for the last three centuries has been extraordinarily rich and diversified.
From this kaleidoscopic sequence, possibly the most sensitive, the most radical and the most disruptive image is that of Baudelaire:
Just as in the old days we would leave for China
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giant dams, expressways, large-scale forestry felling, with 'appro- priate technologies' better adjusted to the natural and social envi- ronment? How to check the power and influence of foreign techni- cians indifferent to local problems? How to control the abysmal growth of destitute shanty towns? These basic problems of China have become the problems of Amazonia, South Asia, Black Afri- ca, Melanesia. The interests of some Parisian intellectuals may have shifted elsewhere, but other intellectuals have remained deeply concerned with the relevance, or the irrelevance, of our Western model of development for less affluent countries. In a recent book dealing with the problems of development," Edgard Pisani, a French intellectual who is also a former French High Commissioner in New Caledonia, has compared the energy gains offered by a large-scale modern dam with the energy savings of 5,000 peasant earthenware stoves. His point is this: these 5,000 stoves are very cheaply produced and they save the heat otherwise wasted when the kettle was just put on stones; these stoves com- pare very favourably in terms of energy gains with the expensive dam built by transnational corporations under the supervision of highly-paid foreign experts. Pisani is a moderate social democrat. He never indulged in radical Maoism. Yet his argument clearly amounts to a posthumous and quite unexpected validation of some basic themes of the Great Leap Forward thirty years ago.
From Watteau paintings and the Pompadour festivities to peas- ant stoves in Black Africa, from the Confucian mirage of the eigh- teenth century to the Maoist mirage of the twentieth century, from Victor Hugo's maledictions against Anglo-French vandalism in Peking to the Gaullian joint celebration of France de toujours and Chine de toujours, from the Philosophes' appeal to China against the tyranny of the old monarchy to the New Radicals' appeal to China against the tyranny of the Western model of development, the story of Sino-French intellectual relations for the last three centuries has been extraordinarily rich and diversified.
From this kaleidoscopic sequence, possibly the most sensitive, the most radical and the most disruptive image is that of Baude- laire:
Just as in the old days we would leave for China
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