Panel presentation :

France has always occupied a unique place in the history of China's relations to the West. While the eighteenth-century philosophes admired Confucian society, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, France was also one of the active colonial powers in China and Southeast Asia. During the same period, however, Chinese and French diplomats, travelers, workers, and students also began to play a more prominent role in facilitating more concrete exchanges between the two cultures. Meanwhile, due to the complex blend of avant-garde culture and legacies of revolution and republicanism, France also became a gateway to modernity for Chinese writers, artists, educators and activists determined to change China. While much has been written about the political activities of the Chinese anarchists in Paris, the experience of Chinese workers on the Western Front during WWI, and the emergence of the Chinese communists among work-study students in France, much less is known about the legacies of these early movements for scientific, cultural, and intellectual developments. This multidisciplinary panel seeks to re-evaluate the complex cross-cultural flows – in the spheres of medicine, biology, education, and literature – that resulted from the work-study movement and other transnational exchanges between China and France in the first half of the twentieth century. The papers offer four case studies that follow Chinese and French scientists, writers, and translators as they use resources gained from their Sino-French experiences to negotiate problems in China's modernization and to build niches in cultural mediation. Together, these cases suggest more complexity and continuity in the history of twentieth-century Sino-Western interactions.