WHEN PARIS WAS “À L’HEURE CHINOISE” OR GEORGES POMPIDOU IN CHINA AND JEAN YANNE’S (1974) LES CHINOIS À PARIS

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Clark

This article looks at two seemingly disparate events: Georges Pompidou’s 1973 presidential visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the filming and release of Jean Yanne’s blockbuster comedy Les Chinois à Paris (1974). Both produced flawed visions of Franco-Chinese relations. During Pompidou’s visit, officials and the press attempted to demonstrate that France enjoyed warmer relations with the PRC than any other Western nation. Yanne’s film parodied the French fad for Maoism by imagining the People’s Liberation Army invading and occupying Paris. His film caused an uproar in the press and sparked official Chinese protest. The article ultimately argues that the two events were deeply related, part of a wave of popular and official interest in China in the early 1970s that extended well beyond the well-known stories of student and intellectual Maoists. This interest paved the way for Franco-Chinese relations as we know them today.

Worldview ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 16-20
Author(s):  
Donald Kirk

The Americans are coming—not merely statesmen and diplomats, not just occasional journalists or teams of scholars or family planners or whatever, but almost anyone with enough money to pay for the privilege and accept some of the nuisance of guided tourism through the People's Republic of China. They jostle for space outside the panda pens of the Peking zoo, madly clicking cameras and shouting greetings at one another. They troop through the courts of the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, mingling with grinning off-duty People's Liberation Army soldiers and hordes of uniformed schoolchildren. They crowd the orchestras of theatres and concert halls, applauding newly revived “revolutionary” operas and dances, often with more spontaneous verve than do the respectfully restrained Chinese around them.The spectacle of Americans in garish, multicolored dress swirling through the lobbies of Peking's halfdozen hotels for foreigners provides a startling contrast to the normal sight of Ma9-suited Chinese bicycling methodically along broad avenues or crowding sidewalks through districts in which tourists until this year were distinct rareties. The Fifth National People's Congress was in full swing in early March when the first batches of American “friends” with no special professional or political affiliations began arriving. By the end of December some fifteen thousand of them had made the tour—a minuscule figure by the standards of virtually any other nation, but a great leap from the tojal of three thousand American visitors in 1977.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Jason Lim

Abstract Official narratives in Singapore have included the crackdown by the ruling People’s Action Party (pap) government under Lee Kuan Yew against the Chinese chauvinists on the city-state’s road to nationhood. From 1959 to 1976, the Lee government believed that Chinese chauvinism came from three sources: a population that was majority ethnic Chinese in Singapore, pro-communist organizations that exploited Chinese chauvinism for their own ends, and individuals or organizations that praised the People’s Republic of China at the expense of Singapore. Using newspaper articles, speeches by government ministers, oral history interviews, and declassified government records held in Singapore and overseas, this article assesses the threat of Chinese chauvinism in Singapore between the years 1959 and 1976. It argues that the Lee government made statements about Chinese chauvinists that were grounded either on truism, or on excoriating individuals, for its own political gain.


1994 ◽  
Vol 139 ◽  
pp. 766-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Tsang

On 11 April 1955 an Air India Constellation passenger airliner, the “Kashmir Princess,” flight 300 from Hong Kong to Djakarta, was sabotaged. It was chartered by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to take its delegation headed by Premier Zhou Enlai to attend the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. On the way to Djakarta with a Chinese delegation aboard there was an explosion, which caused the aircraft to crash into the sea. All eleven passengers were killed and only three members of the crew survived; Zhou was not amongst the victims.


1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 241-244
Author(s):  
Henry R. Rollin

For the fortunate few who participate in College study tours abroad, an added bonus—and a not inconsiderable one at that—is the opportunity to abdicate all responsibility. From the moment of take-off on the way out to the moment of touch-down on the way back, the tour leader takes over as a sort of surrogate father. On this occasion our father, ironically enough, may not have been the youngest among us chronologically speaking, but he was nevertheless the youngest in heart. He was irrepressible, imperturbable and ebullient, and on his, admittedly, broad shoulders fell the onus of caring for a mixed bag of psychiatrists and their spouses, mixed, that is, in terms of age, sex and, in particular, temperament. We, with little respect for his status, chose to call him ‘Cyril’, whereas our Chinese colleagues with their traditional sense of propriety and respect for parental status, gave him his due and saw fit to address him reverentially as, ‘The Honourable Dr Cyril Davies’.


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