Beijing, August 1982. Deng Xiaoping leaves the room where the congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is being held to greet the mayor of Montargis (Loiret), visiting with other French elected officials. The “Venice of Gâtinais” is dear to the new master of China. He lived there in the 1920s, dividing his time between French classes, political meetings with his compatriots and the Hutchinson factory, in the neighboring town of Châlette-sur-Loing, where the head of the shoe workshop was called Mrs. Rose. One of his best memories remains learning to waltz at the La Gloire dance hall, and the most unpleasant, his arrest by the constabulary for faulty bicycle lighting. The first time he returned to France on an official trip, in 1975, Deng wanted to “eat croissants like in Montargis”.
He was only 16 years old when he arrived in Marseille with a hundred comrades from Sichuan. After passing the French exam controlled by the Shanghai consul, Albert Bodard, father of the great reporter Lucien, he was admitted to the contingent of the “work-study movement”. This early Erasmus allowed 4,000 young Chinese to come and study in France between 1912 and 1927, their studies being financed by work in the factory.
Chinese student workers employed in a soybean factory
The designer of this extraordinary educational program is Li Shizeng (1881-1973). This son of a family of mandarins entered the Montargis Agricultural School in 1903, before devoting himself to biochemistry at the Sorbonne and then at the Pasteur Institute. Six years later, he employed around thirty Chinese student workers at Caséo-Sojaïne, his small soy factory located in La Garenne-Colombes. He is convinced that tofu will save the planet from famine.
Li is fidgety. He returns to China to support his friend Sun Yat-sen, president of the young and short-lived Chinese Republic. Back in France, he opened the first large Chinese restaurant in Paris, then created the Franco-Chinese Education Society, responsible for welcoming new scholarship recipients. The “work-study movement” draws its ideological sources from a strange cocktail of anarchism, wounded nationalism and fascination-repulsion for the West, which was expressed in all its vigor during the revolt of May 4, 1919. This that day, 3,000 students gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing to protest against the transfer of the former German concessions in China to Tokyo. Under pressure, the government of the Warlords, a succession of rival military factions, finally gave in and disavowed the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles.
The “May 4th movement” will shape the patriotic consciousness of an entire generation. It already constitutes a victory for an entire critical current which judges traditional society responsible for successive renunciations, from the Opium War to the “unequal treaties”, which opened the country to all winds to foreign powers, in the middle of the Nineteenth century. This movement bringing together scholars no longer swears by democracy, science and technology. To imitate the West, which has shown its superiority, but also to fight it, with its own weapons.
One of its thinking heads, Cai Yuanpei, is close to Li Shizeng, the “Chinese of Montargis”. He first devoted himself in translation to understand the reasons for Western supremacy, before studying philosophy in Berlin and Leipzig. In his eyes, education remains the main driving force behind China’s rebirth, and he devoted his life to it in the positions of Minister of Education or Rector of Peking University. In this group of scholars mixed with men of action, other figures will experience varying fortunes: the linguist Wu Zhihui will be advisor to Chiang Kai-shek, and he will follow him to Taiwan; Chu Minyi, a medical student in Strasbourg, joined the left wing of the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party), the first modern political party, created by Sun Yat-sen, before compromising himself in the pro-Japanese government in Nanking.
We are descendants of great families
Several student workers will experience equally remarkable trajectories: Nie Rongzhen will be marshal of the People’s Liberation Army; Cai Hesen, Mao’s ex-fellow student, the first to propose the creation of a communist party, “the vanguard and command of the revolution” – it will be founded in July 1921. For the moment, barely Having arrived in France, these future political leaders must work part-time. These offspring of great families will meet workers for the first time in their lives: their compatriots who came during the Great War to replace the French workforce sent to the trenches. The current doesn’t always flow.
Newcomers are hired at Renault, in Billancourt, at the Schneider factories in Le Creusot, at Chambrelent (making paper fans and flowers), in Paris… They created an Association of Chinese Workers in 1919 in La Garenne-Colombes. Close to communist ideas, she usually found herself in a Parisian apartment at 17, rue Godefroy (13th arrondissement), occupied until now by a certain Zhou Enlai. Mao’s future Prime Minister arrived in Marseille two months after Deng (in October 1920), but through another channel, exclusively political, since he was responsible for establishing communist cells in Europe (even before the creation of the CCP) . During his stay, he met Deng, but also Zhu De, the “father” of the People’s Army, and the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Paris between the wars was the capital of the anti-colonialist struggle. The celebrities of tomorrow reside there, the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias, the Algerian Messali Hadj…
During his visits to the workbench (he was also an assembler at Renault-Billancourt, then at Kléber, in Colombes), Deng met the young compatriots who would create the League of Chinese Socialist Youth in Europe, the reservoir of the Communist Party in the making. The “Montargis faction”, according to the expression of official Chinese historians, contributed largely to what would become the Maoist “epic”. In the evening, Deng writes his comrades’ articles on stencils and runs the mimeograph machine. He joined the Kuomintang in 1923, before being accepted the following year into the underground CCP. In 1926, the student-worker who became a professional revolutionary went to Moscow for training.
Student workers are hyper-politicized. Their first agit-prop action, in February 1921, was the occupation of the brand new Franco-Chinese Institute in Lyon, created by Li Shizeng, their master. The disciples rebel against the allocation of funds which were intended for them, they claim, to this new establishment. Without delay, the French authorities, citing an early OQTF, returned around a hundred of them. The expellees resume militant action as soon as they set foot on Chinese soil. They notably organized demonstrations against imperialism and warlords by Shanghai University students in 1925., during which police officers from the international concession opened fire. Their action was immediately relayed to Paris, where around a hundred demonstrators invaded the Chinese Legation, rue de Babylone. New expulsions of student workers.
For the first time, newspapers are interested in Chinese agitation on French soil. A news item that occurred a little earlier should have attracted their attention: Chinese student workers, led by a certain Deng, were suspected of having wanted to liquidate the nationalist students, who were training at the Versailles shooting center.…
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