RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522
11

CHINA IN THE EYES OF THE FRENCH INTELLECTUALS

JEAN CHESNEAUX

The following lecture, given originally in Canberra, was presented there as the "Morrison Lecture" for the year 1987, as a contribution to the memory of that remarkable person, G. Morrison, who crossed Australia on foot and China on foot at the end of the nineteenth century, so as to win the most influential position (at that time) of permanent correspondent in Peking for the London Times for a quarter of a century.

In Hong Kong, the name George Morrison, if not forgotten, is certainly less prominent than in Canberra, where the Morrison Lecture has been every year an important event for the last fifty years. May I consider these remarks on the lasting impact China has made for three centuries on French intellectuals, as a kind of unofficial “Victor Segalen Lecture". Victor Segalen, an equally remarkable person, a traveller, a navy officer, an anthropologist, a poet, an archaeologist, visited Hong Kong several times in the early years of this century, between his travels in Eastern Polynesia and his archaeological expeditions in northern China.

May I add a personal footnote, before beginning the lecture. I am all the more happy to pay tribute to Victor Segalen, in the present circumstances, for it seems that, at least in France, very few persons have actually extended their intellectual work, cultural interests and actual movements, both to the South Pacific and to China. Being another such person, the name of Victor Segalen is for me a very appropriate reference.

* This is the 1987 George Ernest Morrison Lecture delivered originally at the Australian National University, and, with slight amendment, to the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society on 27th February, 1987. It is reprinted with the permission of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. Professor Jean Chesneaux is a sinologist of international repute, and author of, among many books and articles, The Chinese Labour Movement, 1919-1927 (Stanford, 1968), Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1971), and China from the 1911 Revolution to Liberation (New York, 1977, with Francoise la Barbier and Marie-Claire Bergere).
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522
To be invited to give this lecture in memory of George Ernest Morrison, that remarkable Australian, is not only a pleasure and an honour; it provides a very appropriate occasion to review the unique position China has held for more than three centuries in the eyes of French intellectuals. Morrison, himself quite fluent in French and well versed in French literature, was very familiar with some distinguished members of the French intelligentsia who visited China during those ‘Morrison years', such as Loti, Segalen and Claudel. He also knew well how prestigious China had been in the eyes of French intellectuals of an earlier period, namely French Jesuits and French Philosophes of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Their writings occupy a distinctive position on the shelves of Morrison's own library, once in Peking and later transferred to Japan. These early French books with their old-fashioned print and leather binding indicated, and Morrison was fully aware of it, that a major intellectual encounter had taken place between France and China. For the Philosophes, for Voltaire, Diderot and other contributors to the Great Encyclopedia, China was a powerful war machine which they directed against the backwardness, the tyranny, the impotence of the Versailles monarchy. As seen in the very title of a well-known French Ph.D. dissertation, China played an essential role in the formation and growth of the esprit philosophique in eighteenth century France.

China, in the view of these philosophes, was an empire ruled by an intellectual elite, namely the Confucian literati. In our subsequent Western political culture, our universities being no exception, ‘mandarin' has become a symbol of bureaucratic rigidity, almost a dirty word. But such was not the case in the eighteenth century. Voltaire praised very highly the Confucian degree holders he called Talapoints, a strange word which has since vanished entirely. China was seen as being ruled by men of wisdom, and this was an obvious contrast to the practices of the French monarchy and its corrupt, incompetent, uneducated officials. China was supposed to be at least as advanced as France, on the way towards Enlightenment, towards l'Age des Lumières.

These peoples [said Diderot], gifted with a 'consentement unanime, are superior to all other Asiatics in antiquity, intellect, art, wisdom, policy, and in their
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522
23

La Pléiade was wide open to classical Chinese literature, which benefited from the Maoist vogue.

The Maoist mirage met nevertheless with reservations and condemnations from various quarters — from the conservative Catholic right-wing and also from the pro-Moscow French Communist Party, which was hardly surprising, but also from two more specific groups, rather influential among intellectuals. The academic sinologists, on one hand, were very critical of the pro-Maoist fashion; with very few exceptions, they were well aware of the simplistic naivety of the new sinophiles. Yet, one should wonder whether their open hostility towards the fashionable intellectuals was not, after all, a kind of defensive reaction against what sinologists considered to be trespassing on their professional estate! On the other hand, pro-Maoist intellectuals were harassed pitilessly by a radical and very vociferous group, the young situationists, whose overall attack against established cultural values of every kind had been an important contribution to the May '68 movement. Thus, an unexpected anti-Maoist alliance was formed between respectable sinologists and sniping situationists, which was to make a lasting impact in France and in which the Canberra academic scene also became involved.

Looking at this strange, erratic, very emotional love affair at a distance, some fifteen or twenty years later, how should we react — including myself? The whole affair was certainly a strange combination of affectation and naivety, of misinformation and self-complacency, which deserves blame and regret and nothing else. We were definitely lacking intellectual rigour, caution, and integrity. Not only did we satisfy ourselves with a rosy picture of China, which was conveyed to us by visitors on short-term and carefully controlled tours, but we made this rosy picture an essential ingredient of our social prestige, our publishing careers, our popularity with the media. We failed completely to assess properly our responsibility towards French public opinion and especially towards those for whom China understandably meant hope, determination, the ability to shape one's own future. I am not sure that self-criticism was something George Ernest Morrison was quite familiar with. But I am pleased that the present Morrison Lecture gives me a convenient occasion for expressing such regret.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g
206

—, Intimate China, the Chinese As I have Seen Them, London Hutchison, 1899

Little, Archibald John, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, or, Trade and Travel in Western China, London Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1888

1

Mount Omer and Beyond, London Heinemann, 1901

Ljungstedt, Andrew, An Historical Sketch of the Portuguese Settlements in China, with Supplementary Chapter - Description of the City of Canton republished from the Chinese Repository, Boston James Munroe and co. 1836

Lo Hui-min, ed, The Correspondence of G E Morrison, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1976

Loch, Granville Gower (1813-1853), The Closing Events of the Campaign in China the Operations in the Yang Tze-Kiang, and the Treaty of Nanking, London J Murray, 1843

Lockwood, Stephen C. Augustine Heard and Company, 1858-1862, Cambridge (Mass) Harvard University Press, 1971

Lonsdale, Anne, Merchant Adventurers in the East, London Longman, 1980

Low, John, Into China, London John Murray, 1986

Lubbock, Alfred Basil, The Opium Clippers, Boston Lauriat Company, 1933 (New York Reprint. AMS)

Lutz, Jesse Gregory, China and the Christian Colleges 1850-1950, Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1971

•

- Christian Missionaries in China (19/20 Centuries), Boston DC Heath Problems in Asian Civilization series

Lyster, Thomas (1840-1865), With Gordon in China, Letters from Thomas Lyster, Lieutenant Royal Engineers, London TF Unwin, 1891

Lyttelton, Edith Sophy (Balfour b1865), Travelling Days, London G Bles, 1933

Macartney, George, First Earl Macartney, Journal of Lord Macartney's Embassy to China, London British Museum, 1897 (Microfilm copy at Hong Kong University Library)

Macartney, Lady, An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan, London Ernest Benn. 1931 (Hong Kong Reprint Oxford University Press)

Macfarlane, W, Sketches in the Foreign Settlements and Native City of Shanghai, reprinted from The Shanghai Mercury, Shanghai, 1881
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2000
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n
258

From 1964, she has been a full-time writer of autobiography/history, fiction, and sociopolitical essays/written testimonies. She once said: 'I write as an Asian, with all the pent-up emotions of my people. What I say will annoy many people who prefer the more conventional myths brought back by writers on the Orient. All I can say is that I try to tell the truth. Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.' She was acquainted with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. She presently lives with Vincent in Lausanne, Switzerland and is also known as Elizabeth C.K. Comber.

Han Suyin and her husband with Zhou Enlai, 19708

Jan Morrison was born in May 1913 and was the son of the well-known Australian doctor and journalist (first Peking correspondent for The Times of London, 1897-1912) George Ernest Morrison (1862-1920). He was schooled at Winchester, England and was a graduate of the University of Cambridge. After going down from Cambridge, he became Professor of English at the Imperial University of Hokkaido, Sapporo.

He visited China in 1937, for the first time, to 'watch the Japanese occupation of Tientsin and the invasion of north China.' Later that year he became private secretary to the newly appointed British Ambassador to Japan, in Kyoto. In 1939, he went to Shanghai and became the representative in China of The British and Chinese Corporation, a London financial house. He traveled extensively throughout China for the next two years.

He arrived in Singapore in October 1941 and became deputy director of the Far Eastern Bureau of the (U.K.) Ministry of Information.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g
392

Ms. Han did not practice medicine in China in the 1950s or at any other time

*

Ms. Leon Comber was a superintendent (not assistant superintendent) with the Malayan police, and acted as assistant commissioner

On the morning of Sunday, 25 June, 1950, communist forces from North Korea crossed the border into South Korea. The next day, on 26 June, President Harry S. Truman ordered American air and naval forces to go to the assistance of South Korea, and Clement Attlee in the House of Commons expressed support for Mr. Truman's actions.

On 27 June, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution recommending that all members of the UN furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to meet the armed attack.' The Korean War had begun.

The unexpected outbreak of the Korean War took all newspapers by surprise but The Times had Ian Ernest McLeavy Morrison, a member of its staff, in the Far East at that time. By August of that year he would be dead.

Born in Beijing on 31 May 1913, he was the son of the famous Australian journalist, Dr. George Ernest Morrison (4 February 1862-29 May 1920) and a New Zealander Jennie Wark Robin (1889 – 20 June 1923), Dr. Morrison's former secretary who he had married in 1912. Dr. Morrison was known as "China Morrison" and was himself a correspondent for The Times during 1897-1912 and later political adviser to the Chinese Government.

His brother, Alastair Gwynne Morrison was born on 24 August 1915. He ultimately joined the Diplomatic

Dr. Morrison and his three sons, Ian, Colin and Alastair, 1917, (Mitchell Library)
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