La chine toute puissante ? Entretien avec Emmanuel Lincot

China emerged from World War II as a victorious power, joining the UN Security Council. However, its contribution remained modest compared to that of the United States and the Soviet Union.

From 1945 onward, China rapidly became a Cold War battleground with two rival factions: Chiang Kai-shek backed by Americans and communists led by Mao Zedong, supported by Stalin.

• Communists already controlled the north and seized Japanese arsenals. • They held a nearly superior military position against the nationalists. • Mao and his allies innovated in guerrilla warfare with psychological intimidation and mass propaganda.

Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan in 1949, while remnants of his army scattered across Burma and Vietnam, some turning to heroin trafficking in the Golden Triangle.

On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China with his founding speech declaring that the Chinese people would no longer be enslaved—a phrase memorized in schools for generations.

• Mao copied the Stalinist Soviet system wholesale. • Establishment of a single communist party without multiparty politics. • Creation of re-education camps called laogaï, equivalent to the Soviet Gulag. • Total prohibition of individual freedoms and expression.

For ten years, China cooperated closely with the Soviet Union, particularly in infrastructure and nuclear technology transfer, aided by French scientists trained by the Joliot-Curies.

From 1960 onward, Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated due to ideological divergences and Mao's fear that Moscow would abandon communist China.

• Sino-Indian conflict in 1962 with Chinese victory and occupation of Himalayan territories. • Prolonged clashes in Southeast Asia involving Soviet-backed Vietnam and China-backed Cambodia. • Low-intensity wars causing millions of deaths.

The Cambodian genocide killed at least 3 million people, with Chinese directly responsible for supporting the Khmer Rouge regime.

Totalitarian regimes systematically organize internal chaos to weaken political opposition, designating class enemies for elimination according to Marxist-Leninist theory.

After Mao, China underwent major transformation reconciling communism with economic liberalism, enabling unprecedented economic growth.

In 1958, Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, ordering 600 million Chinese to build small blast furnaces to melt all iron objects, even kitchen pots, to manufacture materials for an ideal future socialist society.

• All primary Chinese forests disappeared in two years to fuel blast furnaces. • The Gobi Desert progressively expanded toward Beijing's gates. • Systematic destruction of the country's natural environment.

The program triggered a disastrous famine: approximately 40 million deaths, the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of the 20th century, documented by historian Frank Dikötter in the work Stele.

Facing criticism from fellow travelers, Mao temporarily withdrew to prepare his comeback through the Cultural Revolution, an event that paradoxically vaccinated young Chinese against Maoism.

Tens of millions of young Chinese, high school and middle school students, were sent throughout the countryside to spread Maoist doctrine, creating deliberately organized chaos by the regime.

In contact with rural areas, urban youth discovered a reality radically different from Maoist propaganda: a miserable country, people barely emerging from absolute famine.

The Cultural Revolution ended up vaccinating even China's most ardent Maoists against the ideology being instilled in them, creating insurmountable cognitive dissonance.

After Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping emerged as the regime's strongman and reconciled communism with economic liberalism, producing double-digit growth for 30 years.

Until 1979, China accounted for only 1% of international economic exchanges, emerging from economic near-nothingness compared to its past status as the world's premier power until the 18th century.

• Shenzhen transformed from a small fishing village to a megacity of 17 million specialized in high technology. • Spectacular coastal development with creation of special economic zones. • Unprecedented infrastructure and industrial revolution.

Life expectancy rose from 35-37 years in 1949 to that of developed countries. Literacy surged from 95% illiteracy in 1945 to 95% literacy today through mandatory education and generalized social volunteerism.

In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization, a watershed event marking its accession to major economic power status and accelerating Western deindustrialization.

Soft power, a concept developed by American political scientist Joseph Nye, refers to cultural diplomacy aiming to influence foreign countries through attraction rather than coercion.

• Chinese cultural initiatives remain almost exclusively the domain of the State and Communist Party. • Individual Chinese cannot promote their culture abroad without state authorization. • Chinese soft power is abrasive and intrusive, unlike democracies.

In the West, Chinese cultural sharp power remains marginal and suspected. In Sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South, it succeeds by offering a counter-model to Western neoliberalism with unapologetic authoritarianism.

A prime example of sharp power: every Chinese citizen starts with 700 points and loses points for infractions. Insufficient points can bar access to transport, medicine, or other essential services.

• Bronzes and brush painting rank highest in Chinese aesthetic hierarchy. • Fascination with European weapons since the 17th century through Jesuit accounts. • China absorbed and transformed foreign influences rather than isolating itself.

Since the late 20th century, Chinese heritage looted or purchased abroad became subject to nationalist demands, with a People's Liberation Army unit tasked with repurchasing objects at auction.

The Poly Museum in Beijing, partially military-controlled, displays treasures repurchased from the West as triumphant trophies of the Chinese people.

Unlike European colonization, which created museums of non-European art, China exhibits neither African nor European art, demonstrating nationalist practice operating in closed circuit.

Beijing deliberately privileges 19th-century humiliation, particularly the Opium Wars and the Summer Palace plundering, as crystallization points for nationalism.

• Silence on the Hundred Flowers Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. • No discussion of roughly 80 million Maoist regime deaths. • Never an official Communist Party apology for these catastrophes.

Twenty-year-old Chinese know virtually nothing of their recent history, unaware of Tiananmen and the Cultural Revolution, making the population easily manipulated.

A nation unable to confront and transcend its conflictual history risks the worst. Instrumentalizing memory for revanchist nationalist ends poses a major threat to global peace.

• Chinese engineers and workers now cost as much as Westerners. • China relocates factories to Burma, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. • End of factory-of-the-world status; China no longer leads in next-generation microprocessor production.

Next-generation microprocessors come from U.S.-allied South Korea and Taiwan, on which China depends. Chronic food insecurity makes China vulnerable to massive agricultural imports.

China is not food self-sufficient while countries like France could be. Paradoxically, globalization renders China extremely vulnerable and dependent on the outside world.

Nearly 500 million Chinese live on $140 monthly income, near the poverty threshold. Absent social safety nets and a failing healthcare system create conditions for political instability.

Taiwan, occupied by Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist army after 1949, became a white-glove dictatorship backed by the United States, contrasting with the red communist dictatorship of mainland China.

• Taiwan is a natural aircraft carrier in the middle of the East China Sea. • Crucial for U.S. operations during the Korean War. • Economic and strategic tensions between China and the U.S. crystallize at Taiwan.

Since 1949, the division of the two Chinas established a fault line persisting today, parallel to the division of the two Koreas created three years later.

Should a third world war erupt, it would likely begin at Taiwan, crystallizing all economic and strategic tensions between China and the United States.

Mao Zedong encouraged runaway demographic growth to prepare for the final struggle against the West, resulting in 600 million Chinese in 1960 and 1.4 billion today.

• Deng Xiaoping imposed the one-child policy to brake catastrophic demographic growth. • Gradual reversal allowed a second child in 2015, then a third today. • Popular resistance: Chinese reject these measures after 70 years of policy shifts.

China is experiencing a shift toward nuclear families and childless families, a natural movement of developed societies, made more severe by economic uncertainty and housing access problems.

• China ratified the Paris Agreement but postpones complete decarbonization to 2060. • It is the world's leading coal producer and refuses rapid phase-out. • Operates a nuclear fleet comparable to France with about 40 reactors, manufactures more, and exports them.

In the early 2000s, permanent smog in Beijing prevented visibility beyond three meters. Explosion of tracheal cancers in China, a dramatic public health crisis.

• Nearly all the country's water tables are polluted. • Soils contaminated with mercury and lead. • Chronic food safety crises and distrust of Chinese products.

China combats climate change domestically but simultaneously supports state enterprises responsible for deforestation in Cambodia and Indonesia, and overfishing off Senegal.

Chinese energy consumption drives global grain prices upward, directly contributing to the 2011 Arab Spring by starving Middle Eastern populations.

The Chinese communist regime demonstrates remarkable resilience and benefits from genuine popular support. Communism functions as a civil religion with believers and faith.

• Emmanuel Lincot contends that history teaches no lessons worth learning. • Totalitarian regimes are inherently impervious to progressive change. • Western education of Chinese intellectuals has never produced the hoped-for democratic effects.

Though pessimistic about the regime, Emmanuel Lincot adopts a Gaullist perspective: regimes pass but nations endure. We must focus on nations, not regimes.

Facing possible retrenchment of mainland China, sinological studies must turn toward Chinese diasporas in France and elsewhere, where countless matters await exploration and understanding.

Contemporary China retains from Mao Zedong the image of a heroic superhuman, concealing reality: one of the 20th century's bloodiest tyrants with 80 million deaths.

Deng Xiaoping issued an official 50-50 verdict on Mao's reign after the Cultural Revolution. Today, for Xi Jinping, the Maoist years are judged absolutely positively.

Questions are no longer asked about ideological deviants in the Maoist regime. Selective forgetting of mass crimes characterizes the official approach.

Sinologist Simon Leys warned: dancing means forgetting. Communist China regularly purges its historical hard drive, making authentic transmission of historical legacy to new generations impossible.

The regime bans Taoist pilgrimages like that to Taishan, a sacred mountain in Shandong, in the name of atheism and scientific rationality of communism.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese clandestinely celebrate Taoist divinities, proving people continue living their own family and ancestral history despite state prohibition.

• Official state propaganda discourse. • History of daily trifles and popular beliefs. • Complex layers of historical understanding coexisting.

China's actual history is infinitely more complex than grand official narrative, with multiple threads between large history and individual experiences.