Claude Cadart

Claude Cadart (Chinese: 高达乐; pinyin: Gāo Dálè;[1] 12 November 1927 – 4 May 2019) was a French sinologist and a specialist in the history of contemporary China. Together with his wife Cheng Yingxiang, he translated and published the memoirs of his father-in-law Peng Shuzhi, a dissident Trotskyist early leader of the Communist Party of China. He was one of the first European intellectuals to criticize Mao Zedong's political campaigns.[1][2]

Biography

Cadart was born on 12 November 1927 in Paris. He participated in anti-Nazi resistance during World War II and later worked as a journalist.[2]

In the early 1960s, Cadart became a researcher at the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI) of Sciences Po and dedicated himself to the study of contemporary China. At a time when many sinologists considered Mao Zedong a visionary leader, Cadart cautioned that Mao's political campaigns, most notably the Cultural Revolution, were not the liberation movements that many European leftists had envisioned, but were merely political machinations for maintaining his own power.[1][2] This was before Simon Leys published Les Habits neufs du président Mao in 1971, the famous work that exposed the destructions of Mao's Cultural Revolution.[1][2]

Cadart was married to Cheng Yingxiang (程映湘), the daughter of the early Chinese Communist Party leader Peng Shuzhi.[3][4] Peng had been expelled from the Communist Party for supporting Trotskyism and fled to France with his family after the Communist victory in China.[3] Cadart and Cheng organized, translated into French, and published the memoirs of Peng Shuzhi,[3] which exposed an aspect of Communist China little known to the outside world at the time.[1][2] After Mao's death in 1976 and the advent of the Deng Xiaoping era, Cadart assisted Cheng with her book Dégel de l’intelligence en Chine.[1]

Cadart died in Paris on 4 May 2019, the centenary of China's May Fourth Movement, at the age of 91.[2]

References
  1. "法国汉学家高达乐逝世". Radio France Internationale (in Chinese). 2019-05-12. Retrieved 2019-05-14.
  2. Béja, Jean-Philippe (2019-05-09). "Le sinologue Claude Cadart est mort". Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 2019-05-14.
  3. Yan Jiaqi (2016-11-23). "彭述之33年的流亡生活". Independent Chinese PEN Center. Retrieved 2019-05-14.
  4. Claude Cadart; Cheng Yingxiang (1998-05-01). "Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan: The Lives and Times of a Revolutionary Couple, Two leading figures of the Chinese Trotskyist movement". China Perspectives. French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) (17): 30. Retrieved 2019-05-15.
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