Xinhua News Agency, Brussels, June 5th Title: Searching for the Red Footprint and Following the Dream of Rejuvenation——A Revelation of the Work-study Program of Early Chinese Communists in Europe
Xinhua News Agency reporter Tian Fan Liu Fang
Back in time a hundred years. There are groups of young people who have traveled across the oceans to Europe, the birthplace of the ideological enlightenment and the industrial revolution. They work-study while studying, exploring ways to save the country and become stronger.
At that time, China was surrounded by great powers, and there were internal and external troubles; in Europe at that time, social changes and turbulence of thought.
The outstanding representatives of these young people discovered the truth in their study and struggle and became firm Marxists. They firmly believe that only Marxism can save China; only the Communist Party can realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Today’s China is already standing among the nations of the world.
Today’s Europe still has the red footprint of revolutionary ancestors.
Seek the original heart, pursue the dream and move forward.
Studying and pursuing dreams
Mondalgi, a small city with a population of about 15,000, is more than 100 kilometers south of the French capital Paris. A few days ago, the reporter drove there to look for the marks left by the early Chinese Communists.
No. 15, Raymond Row Street, is a three-story building with a history of more than 300 years. More than a hundred years ago, a group of Chinese work-study youths were active here. Today, this is the Memorial Hall of Work-Study in France, where nearly a thousand exhibits such as photos, documents, and utensils are on display. Curator Wang Peiwen introduced that some of the revolutionary ancestors such as Li Weihan, Li Fuchun, Li Lisan, and Luo Xuezhan had lived here and some participated in activities here.
“Visitors come here, looking at these vigorous faces, reminiscing about their years of hard work and thrifty study, and they always admire and admire them,” Wang Peiwen told reporters.
A mottled old photos, one after another determined young youth. They came from far away, in pursuit of cultural knowledge, in order to save the country and build strength.
After the Opium War, China embarked on the road of “open eyes to see the world,” and experienced a series of painful failures such as the Westernization Movement, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, and the Reform Movement of 1898. The Revolution of 1911 ended more than two thousand years of feudal monarchy, but Chinese society was poor and weak, and advanced intellectuals were still struggling to explore the way to save the country and rejuvenate the country.
Inspired by the concepts of “Education to Save the Country”, “Science to Save the Country” and “Industry to Save the Country”, advocating studying abroad in Europe and America has become a social trend. A hundred years ago, France had a great influence on China because of its advanced industrial civilization and revolutionary tradition. Cai Yuanpei and Wu Yuzhang, who are enthusiastic about education, actively advocated and organized young intellectuals to study in France.
On March 17, 1919, Shanghai Huishan Wharf. 89 vigorous young people boarded the Japanese wheel “Inabamaru”, they were the first batch of students to go to France for the work-study movement. The departure was quite a sensation, and all walks of life held a grand farewell party.
The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and other academic institutions found in the process of combing historical data that from March 1919 to the end of 1920, there were more than 20 batches of work-study personnel who had been studying in France set off from various piers along the Huangpu River in Shanghai, and a total of about 1,600 students went to France. .
Mondalji has become an important activity place for the work-study movement in France, and the locals are also proud of it. On the 110th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s birth in 2014, the city of Mondalji named the square in front of the railway station “Deng Xiaoping Square.” In 2019, the “Hundred Years Monument” sculpture, which reproduced the style of Chinese youths studying in relief form, was completed here again.
Strolling through this beautiful water city with criss-cross rivers, there are more than ten “great footprints” signs commemorating this special history. A red tourist route was opened in 2015, piercing the footprints of Chinese work-study students that year like a bead.
Benoit Dillon, the mayor of Mondalgi, welcomed the visit of the Chinese reporter warmly. The building where the Mondalji city government is located is the male public school where Chinese youths used to study.
Talking about the wave of studying abroad a hundred years ago, Di Jong said: “Most of them are outstanding students from various provinces in China and outstanding figures in Chinese intellectual circles, who came to France to find a way to progress.” “Through reading literature, reading Karl Marx, Perhaps through contacting the reality of local residents and local factories, they discovered communism and then joined the Chinese revolution.”
Tempered by wind and rain
Walk tens of meters to the northwest from Plaza Italia in the 13th arrondissement of Paris and turn into the quiet Godfroy Street. There is a commemorative plaque on the wall at the corner of the street. The relief of the head on the plaque is the handsome face that the Chinese feel more cordial and often cited. People stopped for a long time. There is a golden French description at the bottom of the portrait-“Zhou Enlai, lived here during his stay in France from 1922 to 1924.”
The Chinese couple who runs the hotel now lead the reporter into the room where Zhou Enlai lived. The room has now been converted into a standard room. At that time, it was just a simple cottage with an area of only seven or eight square meters and no bathroom facilities.
Zhou Enlai, who lived in the small room, did not stop thinking about the future of the country and the destiny of the nation for a moment. He worked and studied during the day, wrote newsletters for Tianjin Yishibao and other newspapers in the evening, and initiated the creation of the Chinese Youth Communist Party in Europe (the predecessor of the Chinese Socialist Youth League in Europe) and carried out party and group activities.
Due to insufficient funds, many Chinese youths who work-study programs need to study and work at the same time. Deng Xiaoping, who was 16 at the time, was forced to work to earn a living after only a few months of studying French and commerce in school. In more than 5 years in France, he moved to work in steel factories, rubber factories and other places, and also worked as a dirty handyman.
The arduous study and work experience enabled a large number of work-study students such as Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yi to have a deep understanding of the exploitation of the working class and a direct understanding of the ills of capitalist society. Under the influence of the October Socialist Revolution in Russia, they accepted Marxism and embarked on the revolutionary road.
Among them, Cai Hesen was the pioneer who believed in Marxism in the work-study movement in France. At the end of 1919, Cai Hesen, with a passionate pursuit of revolutionary ideals, traveled across the oceans to France for a work-study program. He felt the impact of foreign civilizations and the turmoil of ideological trends in France, “Meng Kan Meng translated” Marxist works, translated important passages of works such as “Communist Manifesto”, “Socialism from Utopia to Scientific Development” and other works, and promoted Russia in October. The revolution and the labor movement of various countries became staunch Marxists.
In 1921, due to changes in the situation, the work-study students began to fight for their own rights and safeguard the interests of the motherland. They first launched a study campaign to ask the Beiyang warlord government for the “right to live and study” in February, then in June they launched a patriotic action against the then Beiyang government’s secretly large borrowing from France, and in September they entered the Lyon Sino-French University. Fight bravely.
The French authorities detained the protesting students who had occupied a building at the University of China-France in Lyon and temporarily detained them in Montlück military prison.
Now, this prison has long been out of service, but basically retains the pattern of the year. The high wall with dense barbed wire stood up, and saw the main building of a gray three-story building. The cell inside the building was small and dark, with only a small window near the ceiling letting through it. According to data, when Cai Hesen, Zhao Shiyan and others were detained here, they did not give up the struggle and initiated a hunger strike.
The students who fought stubbornly were eventually sent back to the country by the French authorities. Alain Raba, vice chairman of the New China-France University Association of Lyon and chairman of the France-China Friendship Association, told reporters: “The work-study students have grown and tempered in this movement. Some of them are for the spread of Marxism in China and the Chinese Communist Party. The establishment of the company played an important role.”
Progress in study, growth in struggle, and truth in search…From the Rhine in the north to the Port of Marseille in the south, these outstanding students have left a red mark on the land of France that will change the course of China and the world. .
Reverberation
During the same period, at the University of Göttingen in central Germany, at the Charleroi University of Labor in southern Belgium… a group of Chinese youths with the dream of studying abroad and serving the country were also active. They are seeking how to “use (Western) science and spiritual education to promote the development of Chinese morality, knowledge, and economy”.
Göttingen is a beautiful thousand-year-old city, famous for the University of Göttingen, home to numerous Nobel Prize winners. You can still see a brief introduction of Zhu De’s study abroad on the website of the Chinese Students’ Federation of the university.
“He (Zhu De) is the second chairman of the Federation of Students. He introduced China to the people of Göttingen and worked hard to make the Germans understand and support the Chinese revolution.” said Wang Jiawen, chairman of the Chinese Federation of Göttingen. Zhu De’s story was in student activities. The Central Committee has been mentioned, and it has always inspired the patriotism of international students and the feelings of serving the country.
In the Göttingen City Archives, the historian Rolf Kolstedt found a yellowed registration card with Zhu De’s photo for reporters from a large pile of materials about Chinese students studying abroad. The young Zhu De was wearing a suit and tie, with piercing eyes under his thick eyebrows.
In recent years, most Chinese tourists who come to Göttingen will go to the house where Zhu De once lived. It was a two-story red brick house with a loft at No. 3 Planck Street. On the front wall was an exquisite marble commemorative plaque with the words “Zhu De, Marshal of the People’s Republic of China” engraved in German.
Charleroi Labor University in southern Belgium was founded in 1903 and was once one of the famous industrial technical schools in Europe. The school’s librarian and historian Willy Pushel showed reporters the precious materials that Nie Rongzhen, Liu Bojian, He Changgong and others studied here.
Nie Rongzhen came to Labor University in 1921 and was admitted to the Department of Chemical Engineering the following year. While in school, Nie Rongzhen read “Communist Manifesto”, “State and Revolution”, “Communist ABC” and other books in the library, looking for ways and methods to transform China.
In August 1922, Nie Rongzhen joined the Communist Party of China established in France by Chinese students studying in Europe at the Charleroi Labor University, and since then embarked on the road of fighting for the cause of communism.
After the baptism of the work-study movement and in-depth rational thinking, many young students feel that the desire to “save the country by industry” is very unrealistic. If they want to save the country and the nation from peril, so that 40,000 compatriots can have food and clothing, only socialism can be implemented. . This kind of thinking played an important role in China’s revolution, development, and reform process in the future.
Since then, a large number of overseas students have gone to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to study, and they have become an important force in the construction and reform of the motherland. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping made an important strategic decision to increase the number of overseas students in order to accelerate the training of talents, learn and absorb foreign advanced science and technology, business management experience and other useful cultures to meet the needs of the country’s four modernizations.
This instruction opened the prelude to my country’s large-scale dispatch of overseas students in the new era and opened a new chapter in my country’s study abroad work. Its historical significance not only lies in learning advanced foreign technology, but more importantly, it has sounded the beginning of my country’s opening up to the outside world. Sound horn.
As Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, President of the State and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, said at the celebration ceremony for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the European and American Alumni Association, the history of studying abroad for more than a hundred years is a history of struggle to “see my ideal China.” He pointed out that they “have grown up as staunch Marxists in the fiery struggle, and have established immortal feats for the development of the cause of the party and the people.”
“Work-study experience has given them a lofty vision, a broad vision, and a broad mind. It is these three qualities that ordinary people cannot have that make them stand out and become the leaders of the revolution.” Duan Mumei, a researcher at the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Analysis Road.
“Contemporary Chinese youth, especially those studying abroad, have to go out more and observe the world well, observe the society of different systems, and then think about it. This is very important,” she said.
History is the best textbook. At the time when the Chinese Communist Party is about to usher in its centenary of its founding, the Mondalji Forest Middle School in France and the No. 1 Middle School in Liuyang City, Hunan, China once again opened the “cloud classroom”. Thousands of miles apart, spanning a hundred years, teachers and students from the two places walked into the history of China’s work-study movement in France.
“The portrait photos of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping left a deep impression on me. I can feel the strong emotions in their hearts.”
“If I go to work-study programs, I will also adapt to the environment, study actively, not forget the motherland, and be ready to serve the motherland at any time.”
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Seventeen or eighteen-year-old high school students, you speak for me. The shining youth of the revolutionary ancestors has stirred the hearts of generations of young people. There is reason to believe that the early Chinese Communists’ pursuit of truth and their dreams of national prosperity and strength will continue to inspire latecomers; the red footprints left by the early Chinese Communists in Europe will surely inspire Chinese youth in the new era to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation On the road of the Chinese dream, we must overcome all obstacles and move forward courageously! (Reporters involved: Tang Ji, Sun Shaolong, Xu Yongchun, Chen Chen, Xiao Yazhuo, Hu Xue, Pan Geping, Ren Ke, Zhang Yuan)
【Editor in charge: Qi Qianru】
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