[
    {
        "id": 210984,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 46,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "21\n\nnineteenth-century sinologists had laid the foundations for modern China in studies in the West.\n\nBut this long episode of almost total neglect of China was to come to an end with the unexpected ascendancy of Communist China. French intellectuals were caught completely unprepared, all the more since there was strictly no equivalent in France to the sympathetic writings of Snow, Smedley and so many other reporters who had prepared at least some sections of British and American public opinion for the Communist takeover. The French intellectual scene was a blank page - a very Maoist feature and this was a decisive contributing factor to what has since been described as the 'love affair' between Maoist China and French intellectuals.\n\nThis love affair is a very complex story, and requires a much closer look. It had first of all to do with the rejection on the part of the French intellectuals of Soviet-styled communism, once so popular with them. China and Maoism provided ex-Communist Party members with an occasion to settle their accounts with Moscow. Chinese communism was also considered a valuable experiment in Marxist economic theory, and noted economists, such as Charles Bettelheim, always made this point. For Jean-Paul Sartre, who was in the late 1960s at the peak of his cultural and political prestige, Peking was definitely different from Moscow.\n\nChina also met a basic aspiration among French left-wing intellectuals, which I would describe as political exoticism, that is, the tendency to look for a political homeland and model of reference in distant, exotic countries. At times in Cuba, at one time in Algeria, in Vietnam, then in China; each provided a substitute for the ideal society France was unable to develop at home, especially after the failure of the May '68 movement which had been so popular with most intellectuals, and not only with students. The radical young intellectuals of the May '68 generation, such as André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, who were later to establish themselves as trendy 'new philosophers', were among the most devoted Maoists.\n\n—\n\nBut it would be just too easy to restrict the love affair between Maoism and French intellectuals to such radical groups. At least",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
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    {
        "id": 210991,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 53,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "28\n\nNOTES\n\nVirgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France, 1640-1740 (Paris, 1932).\n\n1 From Diderot's Encyclopédie. English translation from A. Reichwein, China and Europe, Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century (Kegan Paul, Trench, Turbner & Co., London, 1925), p.92. Reichwein offers the best comprehensive treatment of China at the Age of Enlightenment, together with L. Maverick (see note 10).\n\n3 Pierre Poivre, Voyages d'un Philosophe (English translation by Reichwein, loc. cit.).\n\nFrançois Quesnay, Le Despotisme de la Chine (Paris, 1767). His friends had dubbed him 'the Confucius of Europe'.\n\n$ Lo Hui-min, The Tradition and Prototype of the China-watcher, 1976 G.E. Morrison lecture (Australian National University, Canberra, 1978), p. 9.\n\n7 Louis Lecomte, Nouveaux mémoires sur l'état présent de la Chine (Paris, 1969). Du Halde, Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise (Paris, 1735).\n\n$ Hugh Honour, Chinoiseries, the Vision of Cathay (John Murray, London, 1961).\n\nIn 1951, at the Lycée de Chartres where I was teaching history, the bicentenary of Diderot's Encyclopedia was celebrated at the initiative of left-wing teachers who were keen to stress the connection between the Encyclopedia and French Revolutionary traditions. I gave a public lecture: 'China and the Encyclopedists', of which the present Morrison Lecture might be considered the direct descendant.\n\n10 Lewis A. Maverick, China, a Model for Europe (Paul Anderson Company, San Antonio, Texas, 1946).\n\n|| From Les Fleurs du Mal (my translation).\n\n12 Evariste Regis Huc, L'Empire chinois (Paris, 1854). For a more severe evaluation of Huc, see Simon Leys, The Burning Forest (New York, 1986), pp. 47-94 (\"Peregrinations and perplexities of Pere Huc').\n\n13 Eugene Simon, La Cité chinoise (Paris, 1885).\n\n14 Paul Claudel, Connaissance de l'Est (Mercure de France, Paris, 1908).\n\n15 The novel by Jules Verne, Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine (1879), is quite unique in its concern for the politics of nineteenth-century China. The hero, Kin Fo, is torn between his fascination with modern technology and his loyalty to his teacher Wong, who is an ex-Taiping leader. It is to my knowledge the only appearance of the Taiping rebellion in French literature.\n\n16 V. Hugo, Lettre au Capitaine Butler, Hauteville House, 25 November 1861 (my translation).\n\n17 Charles Bettelheim, Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organisation in China: Changes in Management and the Division of Labor, trans. by Alfred Ehrenfeld (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1974). See also China Since Mao, by Neil G. Burton and Charles Bettelheim (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1978).\n\n18 Claude Roy, Clés pour la Chine (Paris, 1954); Etiemble, Le Nouveau singe-pèlerin (Paris, 1957); Philippe Sollers, Tel quel (a literary magazine edited by...",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    }
]