Looking and Feeding in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

This article deals with French travel texts concerned with China and published in the mid-twentieth century, at a moment when the PRC was opening up to the West and was the object of a proliferation of narratives produced by French ideological tourists bent on celebrating the merits of the Maoist regime. It positions the authors of the texts in question, René Étiemble and Jules Roy, not as typical voyageurs idéologiques but rather as travellers driven by a desire to extract from China a form of sustenance that is finally withheld, and examines the effect on their travellers’ tales of the PRC’s refusal of various sorts of gratification. More broadly, it contributes to investigations of the particular variant of culture-contact that has obtained between France and China in the twentieth century and after.