A Chinese Janus? Han Suyin’s Tightrope Walk between East and West (1917–2012)

Abstract

During the Cold War, the Sino-Belgian writer Han Suyin was one of the People’s Republic of China’s most famous propagandists in the West. Originally known as an author of autobiographical romance novels, she used her renown to promote and defend Beijing’s radical politics from the 1950s to the 1990s. Her controversial analyses and her oratory skill attracted diverse audiences to her lectures throughout the world. This article investigates multiple facets of this charismatic figure and aims to deconstruct the public persona of Han Suyin in order to understand how she came to embody the political concept of “friendship with China.”

Keywords:

• China
• propaganda
• Cold War
• Europe
• United States
• people-to-people diplomacy
• Maoism
• literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author .

Notes

1 Han Suyin, Ma maison a deux portes (Paris: Stock, 1979), 207. This sentence is absent from the English edition of the book. All the translations from French are from the author.

2 Sophie Coeuré, La Grande Lueur à l’Est. Les Français et l’Union soviétique (1917–1939) (Paris: Seuil, 1999); Jan C. Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda für die Sowjetunion in Polen und in der DDR (Köln: Böhlau, 2006); Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Sabine Dullin et Brigitte Studer (eds.), “Communisme Transnational,” Monde(s) : Histoire, Espaces, Relations, no. 10 (2016).

3 Simon Winchester, Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China (London: Viking, 2008); Shaw Alistair, Telling the Truth About People’s China (PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 2010); Utpal Vyas, Soft Power in Japan-China Relations: State, Sub-State and Non-State Relations (London, New York: Routledge, 2011); Perry Johansson, Saluting the Yellow Emperor. A Case of Swedish Sinography (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2012); Liu Kaixuan, Le miroir chinois : les attitudes françaises face à la Chine dans les milieux politique, diplomatique, intellectuel et médiatique, de 1949 au milieu des années 1980 (PhD diss., Sciences Po Paris, 2019) ; Liu Yuxi, Les relations transnationales entre le Québec et la Chine populaire (1960–1980) : acteurs, savoirs et représentations (PhD diss., Université du Québec à Montréal, Université d’Angers, 2019); Cyril Cordoba, Au-delà du Rideau de Bambou: relations culturelles et amitiés politiques sino-suisses (1949–1989) (Neuchâtel: Alphil, 2020).

4 “Sa Maison a 29 pièces” Paris-Pékin, November/December 1979, 63 and “La longue marche aux aveux de Han Suyin,” Marie-Claire, November 1979, 27, folder 1, box 68, Han Suyin collection (HSC), Howard Gotlieb Archival Center (HGARC), Boston.

5 Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937).

6 Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

7 Jean-François Fayet, VOKS : le laboratoire helvétique : histoire de la diplomatie culturelle soviétique durant l’entre-deux-guerres (Genève: Georg, 2014), 20.

8 Anne-Marie Brady, Friend of China – The Myth of Rewi Alley (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003); Beverley Hooper, Foreigners under Mao: Western Lives in China, 1949–1976 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016).

9 Among others: A Many-Splendoured Thing, and the Rain my Drink et The Mountain is Young in the first category; The Crippled Tree, A Mortal Flower et Birdless Summer in the second; and China in the Year 2001 et The Morning Deluge for the third one.

10 Jinhua Emma Teng, “The Construction of the ‘Traditional Chinese Woman’ in the Western Academy: A Critical Review,” Signs vol. 22, no. 1 (1996): 121; Xin Huang, The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era: Women’s Life Stories in Contemporary China (New York: State University of New York Press, 2018).

11 Megan M. Ferry, “Marketing Chinese Women Writers in the 1990s, or the Politics of Self-Fashioning,” Journal of Contemporary China vol. 12, no. 37 (2003): 655–75; Mengying Jiang, “Female Voices in Translation: An Interrogation of a Dynamic Translation Decade for Contemporary Chinese Women Writers, 1980–1991,” The Translator vol. 25, no. 1 (2019): 1–12.

12 Gail Hershatter and Wang Zheng, “Chinese History: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis,” The American Historical Review vol. 113, no. 5 (2008), 1406.

13 Emily Honig, “Iron Girls Revisited. Gender and the Politics of Work in the Cultural Revolutio, 1966–76,” in Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households and Gender in China, edited by Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 97–110; Jin Yihong, “Rethinking the ‘Iron Girls’: Gender and Labour during the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Gender & History vol. 18, no. 3 (2006): 613–34.

14 Han Suyin mentioned the possibility of publishing her private documents as early as in the 1950s. In 1977, she began to entrust her personal archives to the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (HGARC) at Boston University. Naturally, she made a careful selection of the documents she chose to send to BU, and as long as she was alive, the access to her collection was primarily granted to people close to her.

15 However, the fact that the author insistently wrote about her own body and her family is, according to Éliane and Jacques Lecarme, one of the characteristics of feminine autobiographies. Jacques Lecarme et Éliane Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, 2nd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015). See also Philippe Gasparini, Poétiques du je : du roman autobiographique à l’autofiction (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2016).

16 In the autobiography, the writer assumes three identities (author, narrator and main character of the story). This literary genre also contains what Philippe Lejeune called the “autobiographical pact,” that is, a sincerity commitment between the author and the reader. Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975) et Signes de vie : le pacte autobiographique 2 (Paris: Seuil, 2005). See also Jean-Philippe Miraux, L’autobiographie : écriture de soi et sincérité, 3rd ed. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2009).

17 Letter to Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis, 18 October 1991, folder 10, box 122, HSC, HGARC.

18 The Chinese Premier managed to stay in office from 1949 to 1976 thanks to his political cleverness. He tried to maintain stability at the head of the country while directing the most radical campaigns launched by Mao Zedong. Gao Wenqian, Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary: a Biography (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007).

19 Han Suyin, My House Has Two Doors (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), 490. See also Han Suyin, Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994).

20 Born under the name of Mathilde Claire Élisabeth Rosalie Geneviève Leenders Zhou Kuang-hu, she became Elizabeth Comber after her marriage with a British officer in the Malayan Special Branch. Finally, the pseudonym she chose as a writer, Han Suyin, meant “Little Voice of the Han.”

21 Suyin, My House Has Two Doors, 100.

22 Ibid., 124.

23 Ibid., 245.

24 Ibid., 296.

25 Ibid., 320.

26 Ibid., 200–1.

27 Ibid., 130.

28 Letter to Felix Greene, 4 December 1959, folder Greene, box 81, HSC, HGARC.

29 This political campaign launched by the CCP in 1956 to encourage intellectuals to express their criticisms against the regime was quickly followed by a massive repression.

30 In the years following the death of Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution was described by the CCP as a time of unrest and disorder instigated by disguised rightists. This was the new leadership’s way to discredit Mao’s inner circle (the Gang of Four), which guided this massive political campaign, without condemning Mao Zedong himself. See for example William A. Joseph, The Critique of Ultra-Leftism in China: 1958–1981 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984).

31 Again, this totally corresponded with Beijing’s official discourse on the Cultural Revolution.

32 Alexander C. Cook, The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

33 Suyin, My House Has Two Doors, 522.

34 Ibid., 438.

35 Ibid., 513.

36 Ibid., 553.

37 Ibid., 482.

38 Ibid., 424.

39 Ibid., 20.

40 Ibid., 570.

41 Later, she also pretended that it concerned 600 people. 24 Heures, 29 September 1982, 68, folder 14, box 67, HSC, HGARC.

42 Han Suyin, Wind in my Sleeve (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 155.

43 Ibid., 36.

44 Peter Sandby-Thomas, Legitimating the Chinese Communist Party since Tiananmen: A Critical Analysis of the Stability Discourse (London, New York: Routledge, 2011).

45 Letter to John Miles, 25 July 1989, folder correspondence, box 114, HSC, HGARC.

46 Letter to Jade, 26 December 1992, folder 10, box 117, HSC, HGARC.

47 When she first gave the manuscript of this book to her editor, Han Suyin warned him that it was “highly controversial because it does give what the Chinese really have done, and how they think; rather than the accepted distortion which is current in the west. Therefore it is very dangerous to “edit” without having a thorough grounding in facts. Hence I want to have the final lookover. Before printing.” Once the first 5000 copies had been printed, she suddenly decided to add a foreword stating that the content of the book was not officially approved by Beijing. She also bought all these copies to make sure that she would not commit a blunder in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Letter to C. A. Watts & Co., 9 August 1967, folder publishers, box 94, HSC, HGARC.

48 See for example Barbara Mittler and Felix Wemheuer (eds.), Kulturrevolution als Vorbild? Maoismen im deutschsprachigen Raum (Frankfurt am Main, Bern: Peter Lang, 2008) and Chi Miao et al. (eds.), La Révolution culturelle en Chine et en France (Paris: Riveneuve, 2017).

49 Suyin, Fleur de soleil, op. cit., 195.

50 This expression from Ernest Renan is quoted by Jean-Philippe Miraux, op. cit., 42.

51 Letter to Zhou Enlai, 1 July 1959, folder political heads, box 86, HSC, HGARC.

52 Sandra Liu, Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Joey Lee, “East Asian ‘China Doll' or ‘Dragon Lady’?” Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections, 3, no. 1 (2018): 1-6. See, for example, how the film adaptation of her 1952 autobiographical novel (Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing) stereotypically depicted her relation with a Western journalist. Gina Marchetti, “White Knights in Hong Kong: Love is Many-Splendored Thing and The World of Suzie Wong,” in Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 109–124.

53 Han Suyin, Fleur de soleil : histoire de ma vie (Paris: Plon, 1988), 28.

54 Elle, 11 November 1968, 121, folder 10, box 68, and Femmes d’aujourd’hui, 22 August 1967, 32, folder 13, box 68, HSC, HGARC.

55 Provençal dimanche, 29 October 1978, 90, folder 12, box 68, HSC, HGARC.

56 Fabrimetal, November 1980, 21–4, folder 12, box 68, HSC, HGARC.

57 Marie-Claire, November 1979, 27, folder 1, box 68, HSC, HGARC.

58 Letter to Sara Sheldon, 31 December 1984, folder Sheldon, box 93, HSC, HGARC.

59 Letter to Christian, 27 January 1981, folder Stock, box 79, HSC, HGARC.

60 Letter to Femina, 21 January 1983, folder Femina, box 80, HSC, HGARC.

61 Han Suyin’s newsletter, 28 January 1960, folder 4, box 12, HSC, HGARC.

62 This is quite surprising, considering that Han Suyin was a close relation of Wang Bingnan, the fourth president of the association, since the 1940s. Letter from the CPAFFCF, 25 July 1984, folder Chinese Association in USA, box 76, HSC, HGARC.

63 Letter to Bill Powell, 2 May 1981, folder Powell, box 89 and letter to Paul-Yves Rio, 6 April 1982, folder Rio, box 91, HSC, HGARC.

64 Letter to Zhou Enlai, 1 July 1959, folder political heads, box 86, HSC, HGARC.

65 Officially, Han moved to Switzerland to “guarantee her freedom of thought [and] follow the example set by Voltaire.” Claude Jurquet, Deux images littéraires de la Chine : Pearl Buck et Han Suyin (PhD diss., University of Montpellier, 1980), 1561.

66 Letter to Hsing Chiang, 20 February 1979, folder Hsing, box 83, HSC, HGARC.

67 Letter to Felix Greene, 27 November 1960, folder correspondence, box 123, HSC, HGARC.

68 Le Nouveau Planète, February 1969, 123, folder 2, box 138, HSC, HGARC.

69 Among those: the Han Suyin Fund for scientific exchanges between China and the West, the Han Suyin-Vincent Ruthnaswamay Prize for best research on India-China Relations and the Han Suyin Rainbow Prize for translation. List of Han Suyin’s activities, folder I. Clips, box 121, HSC, HGARC.

70 Cyril Cordoba and Liu Kaixuan, “The Friendship Associations with China in France and Switzerland” in Europe and China in the Cold War: Exchanges Beyond the Bloc Logic and the Sino-Soviet Split, edited by Janick Schaufelbuehl, Marco Wyss and Valeria Zanier (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 85–107.

71 Letter to the Canada-China Friendship Association, 25 June 1977, folder 9, box 15, HSC, HGARC.

72 Le Soir, 28 April 1966, folder 13, box 68, HSC, HGARC.

73 Usually, she only asked her hosts to reimburse her travel costs (200 to 500 dollars).

74 Letter to the Canada-China Friendship Association, 25 June 1977, folder 9, box 15, HSC, HGARC.

75 Letter to Antonella di Maio, 24 January 1997, folder 3, box 124, HSC, HGARC.

76 Tape House of Commons, 25 April 1965, box 17, HSC, HGARC.

77 As a strong support of Beijing, Han Suyin naturally supported the PRC’s policies in Tibet. In 1977, she even published a report about her visit in that region: Lhasa, the open city. A journey to Tibet. On the issue of Tibet in Sino-Swiss relations, see Ariane Knüsel, “‘Armé de la pensée de Mao Tsé-toung, on peut résoudre tous les problèmes’ : l’influence de la Révolution culturelle sur les relations entre la Suisse et la République populaire de Chine,” Relations internationales vol. 3, no. 163 (2015): 29–46.

78 Report of Freundschaft mit China, March 1978, 9, folder 2, archives from Freundschaft mit China Bern (Switzerland).

79 Han Suyin, My House Has Two Doors (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), 236.

80 Letter to the Dutch association, 15 January 1979, folder China Associations Europe, box 76, HSC, HGARC.

81 Nouveau Figaro, November 1982, 78, folder 12, box 68, HSC, HGARC.

82 Letter to George Hatem, n.d., folder Ma Haiteh, box 87, HSC, HGARC.

83 Letter to Ingrid, 9 September 1995, folder 2, box 120, HSC, HGARC.

84 During the promotion of her book about Tibet, she recommended her French editor: “Do not use too much superlatives for the American version of the text, and do not say that I wrote this book ‘in the Himalayas’, because that would be laughable for the people in France (not in the United States, where people are still dreaming about Shangri-La).” Letter to Stock, 14 June 1982, folder Stock, box 79, HSC, HGARC.

85 Chung-Chan Yeh, “The Role of the Intellectual in China,” Third World Quarterly vol. 11, no. 2 (April 1989): 143–53.

86 Roland Lew, L’intellectuel, l’État et la révolution : essais sur le communisme chinois et le socialisme réel (Paris, Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1997).

87 Timothy Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

88 In 1973, one year before the translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the Sino-French Jean Pasqualini had already described the treatment he received during seven years in the Chinese force-labor camps (laogai). Jean Pasqualini, Prisonnier de Mao : sept ans dans un camp de travail en Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

89 Letter to Henry Poupon, 10 January 1985, folder Poupon, box 89, HSC, HGARC.

90 Letter to Claude Lafaye, 20 February 1982, folder miscellaneous, box 97, HSC, HGARC.

91 See especially the critics of Simon Leys in “La forêt en feu,” in Essais sur la Chine (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998), 694–5. See also Philippe Paquet, Simon Leys : navigateur entre les mondes (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), 185–95.

92 Letter to Paul-Yves Rio, 10 July 1980, folder Rio, box 90, HSC, HGARC.

93 Letter to Felix Greene, n.d., folder Greene, box 81, HSC, HGARC.

94 Thomas Osborne, “On Mediators: Intellectuals and the Ideas Trade in the Knowledge Society,” Economy and Society vol. 33, no. 4 (2004): 430–47; Christophe Charle, “Le temps des hommes doubles,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine vol. 39, no. 1 (January/March 1992): 73–85.

95 Letter to George Hatem, n.d., folder Ma Haiteh, box 87, HSC, HGARC.

96 Han Suyin’s defense manuscript, n.d., folder 11, box 124, HSC, HGARC.

97 National Guardian, 4 February 1967, 8, folder 5, box 63, HSC, HGARC.

98 Télé magazine, 9/15 December 1967, 7, folder 2, box 13, HSC, HGARC.

99 Suyin, Fleur de soleil, op. cit., 131 for the first sentence, 216 for the second.

100 “Most of what I do and say in China goes unknown and ignored in the west (and for very good reason, since it is for the good of China and not to come under the benevolent and patronizing eye of whatever white intellectuals arrogating themselves the right to sit in judgement on everything and everyone).” Letter to Sarawathi, 2 April 1984, folder correspondence, box 113, HSC, HGARC.

101 Lecture at the Université de Laval, Tape Canada, October 1980, box 108, HSC, HGARC.

102 Letter to Kung Peng, 14 October 1957, folder Kung Peng, box 85, HSC, HGARC.

103 Letter to Mao Zedong, 20 April 1971, folder political heads, box 86, HSC, HGARC.

104 Letter to Zhou Enlai, 1 July 1959, folder political heads, box 86, HSC, HGARC.

105 Letter to Kim Il-Sung, 17 June 1980, folder political heads, box 86 and letter to the Cambodian ambassador in Beijing, 10 August 1978, folder Kampuchea, box 98, HSC, HGARC.

106 Letter to Jimmy Carter, 27 March 1977 and letter to Zbigniew Brzezinski, 4 July 1978, folder political heads, box 86, HSC, HGARC.

107 Letter to Richard Nixon, 20 December 1978, folder political heads, box 86, HSC, HGARC.

108 Claude Roy, who published a book about his travel to China (Clefs pour la Chine) in 1953, became a harsh critic of Maoism during the Cultural Revolution.

109 Letter to Anita Biai, 28 April 1981, folder Biai, box 70, HSC, HGARC.

110 “Han Suyin et la dernière expérience chinoise,” Le Figaro, 23 May 1980, folder 2, box 68, HSC, HGARC.

111 On this topic, seer Bonnie S. McDougall, “Writers and Performers, Their Works, and Their Audiences in the First Three Decades,” in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China: 1949–1979, edited by Bonnie S. McDougall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 269–304 and Merle Goldman, An Intellectual History of Modern China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

112 Merle Goldman, China’s Intellectuals Advise and Dissent (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 1981); Timothy Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

113 Times Literature Supplement, 14 March 1968, folder 5, box 67, HSC, HGARC.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 159685].

Notes on contributors

Cyril Cordoba

Cyril Cordoba is a postdoctoral researcher working on Switzerland’s political and cultural exchanges with communist regimes during the Cold War. He has been a visiting scholar at Sciences Po Paris and at the University of Lausanne. His publications deal with Chinese international propaganda networks, Maoism in Western countries and Sino-Swiss relationships (1949–1989).