A Frenchman in China
YU, FREDERICK T. C.
A Frenchman in China The Serpent and the Tortoise. By Edgar Faure. St. Martin's Press. 205 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Frederick T. C. Yu Ford Foundation Fellow, M.I.T. Center for International...
...Suggestions such as the following illustrate his reasoning: "China must be aided in the immense effort which her people are making to get out of the rut...
...The author apparently believes so...
...Harvard University ONE OF THE GALAXY of France's postwar premiers, Edgar Faure visited Red China in 1956 at the invitation of the Peking Government...
...What is puzzling is his logic...
...Faure does not actually explain this allegory until the last page of the book where he leaves his readers with these questions: "Are capitalism and Communism going to face each other indefinitely and watch one another like these two promontory figures from the opposite sides of a liquid frontier...
...It is not an account of his journey, which would have been interesting, no doubt...
...more open, more assured and bolder . . . toward the Communist countries (and China in particular...
...Between East and West, as between the Serpent and the Tortoise, are we to throw a bridge...
...Can the entire issue between Peking and the West be as simple as that...
...As the author himself admits, "It is difficult enough for a visitor from the West both to understand the general ferment and to find out what there is new that could justify it," and "the peculiar logic of Chinese Communism has no relation to western logic...
...Center for International Studies...
...Our principal trump, at the moment, is to renounce a fiction...
...Faure's suggestion should, of course, surprise no one...
...This book is the result of his five-week visit...
...Now this is a task which normally requires an intimate knowledge of China's past and present and a stay in the country of more than five weeks...
...The French Radical party leader is quite impressed with Red China, so impressed that he laments the fact that "judicially and diplomatically, for a great part of the West, Mao Tse-tung and the China of Mao Tsetung do not exist...
...He takes on, among others, the problem of "Communism in the Chinese way," the design and operation of Peking's "united front" policy, the intricate Cheng Feng, or rectification, campaign and the "hundred flowers and hundred schools" movement, the complicated question of Chinese economy and the entire controversial issue of East-West relations...
...He argues that "for China, the main question, or to be more exact the key question, is Formosa," and that once the problem of Formosa is settled, "everything would be very different...
...Or are we to admit that they correspond to different stages of the technical life of humanity and that it is possible to establish a link between the one and the other...
...His concern for Red China is clearly reflected in the allegorical theme of the serpent and the tortoise, the names of two promontories facing each other on the Yangtze River at a point where a gigantic bridge was constructed in 1957 to link the tricity area of Wuchang, Hankow and Hanyang...
...Instead, the French visitor sets himself the treacherous and staggering task of making a comprehensive analysis in some 200 pages of Communist China...
...The French leader wants a bridge to be built and he has a ready blueprint for its construction: To placate Peking by settling the problem of Formosa as soon as possible...
...Throughout the book Faure urges the West to advocate "a fresh policy...
...So that one day 'men will forget that once was here an impassable chasm.' " (sic...
Vol. 42 • February 1959 • No. 6
