Chinese pieces of the French mosaic: The Chinese experience in France and the making of a revolutionary tradition

This dissertation is about the first Chinese community to emerge in a European country. Aside from a small number of wealthy merchants and government officials, this community comprised mainly laborers and students who came to France at a particularly tumultuous time in history. In 1912, the last imperial dynasty fell and a republic was proclaimed in China. In 1914, the belle époque ended abruptly with the guns of August in Europe. The Chinese community in France was a crossroads of East and West, a microcosm of the ways in which these two parts of the world came together in the first half of the twentieth century.; First, the carnage and horror of industrialized warfare gave rise to a massive Sino-French encounter. Chinese peasants eager to escape poverty and hopelessness were recruited by the governments of Great Britain and France and became coolies on the western front and laborers in French factories. Ironically, the great tragedy that ushered in the twentieth century also introduced these men at the bottom rung of society to Western modernity for the first time in their lives. In serving the Allied war effort, many of these formerly illiterate peasants learned to read and write and even began to perceive themselves as “Chinese” and as “laborers.”; Second, the outcome of the Versailles peace conference with regard to China and Japan precipitated a great outburst of nationalistic fervor in China, the May Fourth Movement, which in turn brought an influx of approximately 1,600 Chinese youths to France in a work-and-study movement. Whereas current historiography treats this immediate postwar development as a precursor to the Chinese communist movement, this work demonstrates the diffuse nature of the political discourse of the Chinese community in interwar France.; Using archival and published sources in English, French, and Chinese, this dissertation unearths a broad range of experiences of this community and reevaluates the historical material that went into the making of modern China's revolutionary mystique. It is a narrative of the resilience of the human spirit, as much as it is a study of the national and communal identities of a group of Chinese in diaspora.