Europe remembers those whose vision inspired a new China

BRUSSELS－A hundred years after the Communist Party of China was founded, there are those who continue to cherish their collective memories of the early communists as young students in Europe, who, under the Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement, began arriving in 1919. They worked a variety of jobs to finance their studies and meanwhile were eagerly seeking a way out for China, a country then plagued by war, poverty and imperialist invaders.

Some of them, inspired by Marxism, established the earliest Chinese communist groups in Europe and became the pioneers that would help save the Chinese nation in the decades to come. Today, their spirit continues to motivate a new generation of Chinese.

Montargis, a city with some 15,000 residents about 100 kilometers south of Paris, was one of the places where the dream of the Chinese communists began.

Memories of those visitors during the 1920s are kept alive in a 300-year-old townhouse at 15 rue Raymond Tellier. The students' former residence has been renovated into a museum and houses a collection of nearly 1,000 photos, documents and other exhibits, an illustration of the friendship between China and France.

"Visitors to the museum often marvel at these young students' ambitions and perseverance in their pursuit of their dream and their faith," says Wang Peiwen, head of the museum and president of the China-France Friendship Association in Montargis.

Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader widely regarded as the chief architect of China's reform and opening-up policy, was only 16 when he first arrived in France in October 1920.

He moved to Montargis in 1922 and worked at the Hutchinson rubber factory while pursuing his study, where his communist ideals took root.

To commemorate the Chinese students' work-study movement, Montargis named the square in front of its central railway station after Deng in 2014. In 2019, a monument was inaugurated there to mark the 100th anniversary of the movement.

"The monument depicts the young Chinese, who, having stood out as the best students from their respective provinces, came to France to explore ways to advance their country," says Mayor of Montargis Benoit Digeon. "They were inspired by communism and worked for the founding of a communist party particular to China."

France, well-known for its part in the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment and the spirit of the French Revolution, was one of the major destinations for Chinese students in their work-study movement.

Historical documents kept at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and other institutes show that approximately 1,600 students left Shanghai for France between March 1919 and the end of 1920. The first group of 89 students boarded a ship from Shanghai on March 17, 1919, making headline news.

Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic of China, lived a meager life between 1922 and 1924 as a young student living in a small room on the ground floor of the Hotel Neptune in downtown Paris.

It was in that room, which could barely accommodate a bed, a desk and a chair, where Zhou studied and worked, writing for a newspaper based in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin to promote new ideas he learned in Europe and organizing communist activities.

Nearly 100 years later, the hotel is now owned by Li Jianle, who, when he bought the hotel in 2001, felt an obligation to protect the historic building and present it to Chinese and foreign guests.

Today, with a bronze statue of Zhou, cast by noted French sculptor Paul Belmondo in 1979, outside the hotel facing the street, the roughly 160-year-old building on rue Godefroy in Paris remains intact, telling the story of its former tenant.

Before they came to know Marxism, the Chinese students, who worked hard to eke out a living, acquired through their experiences in Europe a profound understanding of the plight of the working class and the defects of capitalism.

Memories kept alive

The university town of Goettingen in central Germany guards the distant memory of Marshal Zhu De, another founding father of the PRC who studied there in 1923 when he was in his 30s.

Today, the university library still keeps a registration paper in Zhu's own handwriting, which shows that the native of Southwest China's Sichuan province was studying sociology in the university's philosophy department.

Zhu met Zhou in Berlin in 1922, and joined the CPC through Zhou's introduction.

"Zhu was not young, and he had spent many years in the military," says Rolf Kohlstedt, a historian at Goettingen City Archive. "He wanted to expand his vision here, in an industrialized Western country."

The city archive shows Zhu's residence registration paper from the local police, a yellowed document with his photo. He lived with a local family at Planckstrasse 3. The red brick house has attracted many tourists to the town, which has a population of 120,000. In 1986, a marble plaque was attached to its facade, with inscriptions reading "Zhu De, Marshal of the People's Republic of China, 1923-1924", in commemoration of his 100th birthday.

Memories of the Chinese communist pioneers are also kept at the Charleroi University of Labor, 60 km south of Brussels.

Founded in 1903 as a polytechnic school for the working class, it hosted many Chinese students in the 1920s, including another of China's marshals, Nie Rongzhen, a then chemical engineering major in his early 20s, who came to know communism and became a member of the CPC on the campus in Belgium.

Through their time in Europe, several of the students realized that only socialism could save China.

Experts have said that the movement played an important role in history and contributed to the founding of the CPC in 1921 and the PRC in 1949, leaving behind a heritage that continues to inspire younger generations today.

For Duanmu Mei, a historian from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, these outstanding representatives of the movement played an epoch-making role in China's future revolution, development and reforms.

"Their experience in Europe gave them farsightedness, a broad vision and an open heart－three important qualities that enabled them to stand out as leaders of the revolution, of the Party and the country," she says.

In a recent event themed on the centenary of the CPC's founding, over 40 Chinese and French teenagers joined a virtual conference on Zoom to review the lives of those early Chinese communists in Europe.

For French-language student Wang Ziyan, the revolutionaries are a source of hope. The student says: "There's so much we can learn from those role models of the past century－their ability to adapt rapidly to a new environment, their passion to learn, and more importantly, their patriotism and desire to repay their country with what they learned."

Xinhua