Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (7 page)

When the Chinese students arrived in Marseilles on October 19, the local paper reported that they wore Western-style clothes with broad-brimmed hats and pointed shoes; the students were immobile and silent, but appeared
very intelligent.
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They were bused to Paris and the next day dispersed to several middle schools that had arranged special training programs in the French language and other subjects. Deng was sent as part of a group of nineteen students to Bayeux Middle School in Normandy.

Some 1,600 Chinese student workers arrived in France between 1919 and 1921 through joint arrangements made by Chinese leaders and their French counterparts, but their arrival was ill-timed. By 1919 the young Frenchmen who had survived the war had returned to work, so jobs in France were hard to come by and inflation was severe. On January 12, 1921, less than three months after Deng and his fellow student-workers arrived in France, the Sichuan foundation, strapped for funds for a program that had quickly outgrown its resources, announced that it was breaking relations with the “diligent work, frugal study” program and that no funds would be available to students after March 15.
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The French government urged the school at Bayeux to find a way to continue the program, but the school reported that it could not locate sufficient funds. On March 13, Deng and his eighteen Chinese fellow “worker-students” left Bayeux; three weeks later he found a job in the southern city of Creusot working at Schneider & Cie, France's largest ordnance factory.

Meanwhile, Chinese students in Paris, also deeply distressed that they could not continue their studies, demonstrated in front of the Chinese government's office in Paris, insisting that the government find some way to help them since they were acquiring scientific and technical knowledge for China's future. The Chinese government in Paris announced that it was not possible, and the French police arrested the leaders of the demonstrations. Throughout France, Chinese students, outraged that their opportunities to study had disappeared, responded by strengthening their contacts with each other and creating their own organizations to protest to both the Chinese and the French governments. Some leaders of the Chinese student demonstrations in France, such as student activist Cai Hesen and Chen Yi, who later served as mayor of Shanghai and as foreign minister, were expelled from France in the summer of 1921 for taking part in such protests.

While the Chinese student-workers in France scrounged for menial jobs that could provide them a subsistence wage, and as factory workers toiling long hours in poor working conditions, they observed rich French business families living lives of comfort far beyond what Deng had known in Sichuan.
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The Chinese students, mostly from more affluent Chinese families, had been selected because of their academic achievements; they were among
the elite selected to learn modern technologies to bring back to China. The jobs they were able to find, however, were those that French workers tried to avoid; they worked as unskilled laborers in heavy and chemical industry factories and mines. Moreover, Deng and the other Chinese workers generally began as apprentices with salaries that were even lower than those of ordinary workers.

The Chinese student-workers in France, despite their humiliating circumstances, took pride in Chinese civilization and saw themselves as future leaders. They formed their own separate communities; Deng never became fluent in French. They also split into various groups to discuss why the Chinese government was so weak and how the world had become so unjust. Some of these group members would go on to become anarchists, whereas Deng and others sought to build a movement to replace the weak and cowardly Chinese government.

Deng arrived in France three years after the Russian Revolution, and what he learned from his more studious fellow workers in discussion groups about capitalism, imperialism, and the Soviet Union gave a deeper meaning to what he had seen and experienced while traveling to, and living in, France. European imperialists were humiliating China, the bourgeois were exploiting workers, and Chinese workers were treated worse than local workers. A vanguard of elites was needed to organize movements to change the situation. Just as young Chinese in France were beginning to work in factories in late 1921, word came of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in July of that year. The initial party was small: in 1921, there were only fifty some members of the Communist Party in China, and in 1922 there were still fewer than two hundred. Its presence, however, was to have a profound effect on the Chinese student-workers in France. In 1922 an organization was formed in France that members referred to as Communist, and in November 1922, one of the student leaders, Li Weihan, was dispatched from France to China to seek approval for affiliating this young Communist organization with the Chinese Communist Youth League. Permission was granted, and in February 1923 Deng took part in a congress of European young Communists who formally declared themselves part of the Chinese Communist Youth League; Zhou Enlai was named party secretary.
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The job Deng had been assigned at the Schneider ordnance factory involved using large metal pincers to pull a large mass of molten steel out of blast furnaces with flames pouring out. Deng, not yet seventeen and just five feet tall, left the job three weeks after taking it and made his way back to Paris
to look for other work. (His uncle lasted at his job at Schneider a month longer.) After some weeks of searching, Deng found a temporary job in a small factory in Paris making paper flowers, then landed a steady job in Hutchison Rubber factory (which then employed about a thousand people, mostly foreigners), located in the small town of Châlette-sur-Loing. There, with a brief interruption, he worked making rubber overshoes, one of the less physically demanding jobs in the factory, from February 13, 1922, until March 7, 1923. After a brief apprenticeship, Deng, like the other workers, was paid by the piece: he thus learned to work quickly and for long periods, logging in fifty-four hours a week. On October 17, having saved some money from his job and having received a small sum from his father, he resigned from the factory and tried to enroll at a nearby college, the Collége de Châtillon-sur-Seine; it turned out, however, he did not have enough funds. Three months later he returned to work at Hutchison. After he left the company a second time, in March, the company records report that he “refused to work” and that he “would not again be given work there.”
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After his last effort to find an opportunity to study failed, Deng devoted himself to the radical cause. While at Hutchison the second time, he took part in study groups established by cells of secret Chinese Communist members in nearby Montargis, many of whom had been his classmates at the preparatory school in Chongqing. Some of the students had been radicalized even before the Chinese Communist Party was formed. Deng was especially moved by the magazine
New Youth (Xin qingnian)
, which was inspiring students in China to join the radical cause; the magazine was led by Chen Duxiu, who had two sons then among the students in France.

Deng remained in Châlette-sur-Loing until June 11, 1923, when he went to Paris to work at the tiny office of the European Communist organization. His coworkers at Hutchison and fellow radicals there and at Montargis had been mostly fellow Sichuanese, but in Paris Deng joined in the national movement with Chinese from other provinces. Upon his arrival in Paris, Deng performed miscellaneous jobs at the office under the direction of Zhou Enlai. Printing the group's ten-page mimeographed journal was a key part of his work, and Deng, skilled at handwriting, cut the stencils and came to be known as “Doctor of the Mimeograph.” In February 1924, the name of the journal was changed to
Red Light (Chi guang)
.
¹⁰
The journal announced the editors' opposition to warlord rule and to imperialism. Its intended readership was Chinese students in France, some of whom were still pursuing anarchism or more right-wing conservative policies. Deng worked under office
director Zhou Enlai, six years his senior, who had met radicals in Japan and England, and was the natural leader among Chinese youth for his sense of strategy and his ability to get diverse people to work together. Under Zhou's tutelage, Deng acquired a broad understanding of the Communist movement, and he too became involved in devising strategies for their movement while cutting stencils for and printing
Red Light
.
¹¹

Having proved himself in the office, Deng was brought onto the executive committee of the Chinese Communist Youth League in Europe. At their meeting in July 1924, in accordance with a decision by the Chinese Communist Party, all of the members of this executive committee, including Deng, automatically became members of the Chinese Communist Party. At the time, the entire Chinese Communist Party, in China and France together, had fewer than a thousand members and Deng was not yet twenty years old.

The political struggles among Chinese students in France paralleled those among young political leaders in China. As soon as the Communists in China in June 1923 announced that they would join the Guomindang under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, the young Communists in France announced that they too would join the Guomindang in Europe. Deng himself joined and by 1925 he had already become a leader of the European branch of the Guomindang.
¹²
In articles in
Red Light
, Deng argued against more conservative Guomindang supporters in favor of more radical revolutionary change.

Two French scholars who carefully traced the activities of Deng during these five years in France conclude: “Here in France, Deng discovered the West, Marxism, the world of work, the organizational work of the party, the place of China, social and regional diversity, and his place in the world.”
¹³
France also affected his taste: for the rest of his life, Deng enjoyed drinking wine and coffee and eating cheese and bread. More important, by the time he left France at age twenty-one, Deng had become a hardened and experienced revolutionary leader, and his personal identity had become inseparable from that of the party and his Communist comrades. From that time until his death seven decades later, Deng's life was focused on the Chinese Communist Party.

In the spring of 1925, having proved himself able and reliable, Deng was assigned to Lyon as head of the party organization there. After demonstrators in China took to the streets on May 30, 1925, to protest that British police in Shanghai had fired into a large crowd of Chinese student demonstrators, Deng joined other Chinese students in France to protest France's continued
cooperation with the oppressive Chinese government.
¹⁴
In November 1925, Deng was assigned to work in the Renault car factory in Paris, where he also carried on propaganda work in an effort to organize workers. It was in late 1925, when top Chinese student leaders of the demonstrations were deported, that Deng, then twenty-one, assumed an increasingly important role in the group, giving major speeches and chairing meetings. On January 7, 1926, Deng, alerted that he too had been targeted for arrest, escaped by train to the Soviet Union, by way of Germany.

In no country outside China did the Chinese Communist Party play a greater role than in France. After 1949, these returnees from France played a unique and important role in building the Chinese state. The French returnees were far more cosmopolitan than the vast majority of Chinese Communist leaders, including Mao, who before 1949 had never left China. Although the French returnees did not necessarily hold high positions in the revolutionary struggles from 1937–1949, from 1949–1966, as the Communists were building the country, not just Premier Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping but other French returnees as well would play leading roles in economic planning (Li Fuchun), foreign affairs (Chen Yi), science and technology (Nie Rongzhen), and even united front propaganda (Li Weihan). The Communist Party abhorred factions, and the French returnees were careful not to behave as a faction, but they shared a special understanding of what China needed to do.

After escaping from Paris, Deng arrived in Moscow on January 17, 1926, and two weeks later was admitted to the first class at Sun Yat-sen University. Eight months after Sun Yat-sen died in March 1925, the Comintern had established Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow for the sole purpose of training members of the Guomindang and the Communist Party.

Within a week after his arrival in Moscow, Deng wrote a self-criticism. Like all Chinese expatriates in Moscow, he was considered a petit-bourgeois intellectual; in his self-criticism, he vowed to give up his class origins and to dedicate his life to being a disciplined, obedient member of the proletariat class. His abilities were soon recognized by officials at the university. The student body of some three hundred students was divided into thirteen groups. Deng was assigned to Group 7, the “theory group,” which consisted of those students who were considered especially promising as future political leaders. His group also included Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek, as well as two daughters and a son of the Chinese warlord Feng Yuxiang, an unusually progressive regional leader who at the time was working with and receiving
funds from the Comintern. Within his group, Deng was selected by his fellow students as the Communist Party representative.
¹⁵

The Chinese students at Sun Yat-sen University were organized under the leadership of a fellow student whom Deng had known in France, Ren Zhouxuan (better known as Ye Qing). Ren demanded strict obedience and military-style discipline, an approach that caused a backlash among many of the Chinese students and the school leadership; in fact, by the summer of 1926, Ren had been removed from the school. Shortly thereafter, the Comintern announced that foreign students while in the Soviet Union would not be allowed to hold meetings of the Communist parties of other countries and instead would become apprentice members of the Soviet Communist Party, with the possibility of becoming full members within five years.