Simone De Beauvoir – Or The Real Mandarin

Simone De Beauvoir – Or The Real Mandarin

In the time of the war lords and of the Koumintang, it was not so hard for leftists, even Stalinists, to write something readable about China. Your leftist went there in person, and afterwards reported frankly what he had seen in Shanghai—or even here, there, or elsewhere in China during those happy years when the banking family which, joined with Chiang Kai-shek, still considered “the interior of the four seas,” that is to say, China, its private domain, and the five hundred million Chinese as its pre-destined slaves. Thus we had the Shanghai of Andree Viollis and the Secret China of Egon Erwin Kisch, two books which one can reread after twenty years without being forced to question the favorable judgment of them one formed when they appeared. One might inflect one’s judgment of certain details, at the most…

Download the full article as a PDF