The history of modern Asia, at least in western countries, for a long time has been conceived only in function of European history. The question was to meditate on the “problem of the Far East,” which is to say on the conditions and objects of the intervention of great Powers in Asia. It consisted in granting privileges to European activities in Asia: missions and trading, military expeditions and diplomatic negotiations. Such a tendency is, for example, very clear in the otherwise notable works of authors such as H. B. Morse or H. Cordier; while the first had been in China for many years as officer of the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, the second was the son of an agent of the Paris National Bank in Shanghai. Nevertheless neither of them knew any Chinese and they did not consider the use of that language any more necessary for an historian of modern China than it had been for a businessman residing in Shanghai concessions during the belle époque of the unequal treaties. The works they published are dedicated to the history of relations between China and the great Powers (Open Door, concessions and extraterritoriality, functioning of treaties), and are only marginally and occasionally interested in the deep movements of Chinese society and Chinese politics: Tai-ping, reformatory movements, social struggle.

Socialism was born in the West in the 19th century, be it the Utopian visions of Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier, or the system, at once theoretical and militant, founded by Marx and Engels. It was the heir not only of the philosophers and economists of the modern age, Diderot, Hegel and Ricardo, but also of a more ancient egalitarian and Utopian tradition, which constitutes its “prehistory” and its “proto-history”: social movements such as the Bohemian Taborites, the Münster anabaptists or the English diggers; and similarly the Utopian outlooks like those of Thomas Moore or Campanella or, still more ancient, Plato himself.

THE VIETNAMESE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT IS DEEPLY AFFECTED BY ITS own history, brief as this has been (it was only founded in 1930). At the same time it has been marked by the triple historical experience of the nation from which it was born : the rich traditions of its secular history, the changes of the colonial period and the trials it has gone through and continues to go through since independence. It is authentically Vietnamese.

Les études historiques relatives à la Chine contemporaine sont encore loin de connaître en France, de même qu'en Occident en général, un essor à la mesure de leur intérêt propre. C'est faute sans doute d'avoir correctement déterminé les rapports entre l'histoire de Chine et l'histoire mondiale à cette époque, faute aussi d'avoir précisé quelle « division du travail » pouvait s'établir entre sinologues historiens d'Occident et historiens chinois, qu'on a laissé prendre à ces études ce retard regrettable. Ce sont donc des principes de travail qu'il faut commencer par définir, avant même de se proposer des perspectives concrètes.

Les lettrés, che, placés au sommet de la hiérarchie sociale en même temps que toute la classe des grands propriétaires fonciers, parmi lesquels ils se recrutaient en fait malgré l'apparente démocratie des examens d'État — nong, les paysans, kong, les artisans, chang enfin, tout en bas de l'échelle des valeurs sociales et politiques, les «perfides marchands» : telle était l'immuable classification des couches de l'ancienne société chinoise, arrêtée par les lettrés eux-mêmes, maîtres de la Chine depuis des siècles.

Cette classification représentait parfaitement l'équilibre des forces économiques politiques de l'ancienne Chine : prépondérance générale de l'agriculture dans la production, souci des landlords de maintenir leur contrôle sur l'ensemble de l'appareil de l'état et de la société ; volonté de ces mêmes lettrés de couper court à toute tentative d'accumulation primitive des capitaux, de la part des négociants aisés.