Deng Xiaoping: The Years in France

Deng Xiaoping has been the subject of several biographies, most of which contain little information about the leader's “French” period. Yet the five years he spent in France cannot be passed over in silence, for it was there and during that time that he first became active politically and joined the Chinese Communist Party. These facts are not in dispute, but the episode as a whole has been illuminated only briefly and in contradictory ways. According to Boorman, for example, “Deng, after attending classes in a special preparatory school in Chengdu […] went to Shanghai, and thence to Europe early in 1920. […] There is no record of Deng's having attended classes at any school or university in France; nor is it clear what type of work he did there.” As far as Boorman is concerned, Deng's stay in France was marked only by his joining the local branch of the CCP and by his (purely technical) activities as a roneographer for Chiguang. On the basis of Soviet sources and of comments made by Deng himself to Edgar Snow, D. W. Klein and A. B. Clark supply further details. Deng Xiaoping, they tell us, was involved in the Chinese worker-student movement in Lyon in 1921; he joined the Chinese Communist Youth in 1922 and the Party in 1924. Some time after that he left France for Moscow: in 1926, according to Klein and Clark, while Boorman puts his departure in the previous year. The Chinese texts available until recently are scarcely more helpful. A famous biographical note put out by the Red Guards informed us, for example, that Deng joined the party in 1925! According to this document