Both produced flawed visions of Franco-Chinese relations. During Pompidou's visit, officials and the press attempted to demonstrate that France enjoyed warmer relations with the PRC than any other Western nation. Yanne's film parodied the French fad for Maoism by imagining the People's Liberation Army invading and occupying Paris. His film caused an uproar in the press and sparked official Chinese protest.
The article ultimately argues that the two events were deeply related, part of a wave of popular and official interest in China in the early s that extended well beyond the well-known stories of student and intellectual Maoists. This interest paved the way for Franco-Chinese relations as we know them today. When Roland Barthes boarded his Paris-Beijing flight in fall , the Air France flight attendant marveled that he had managed to get a visa. The director's latest blockbuster comedy had used hundreds of extras and extravagant sets that transformed iconic sites to produce a story about the People's Liberation Army occupying the French capital.
_-_2022-07-30_-_3.jpg "Adult Guide La Courneuve")
Even before the film arrived in theaters that February and inspired viewers to go see China for themselves, it had sparked a minor diplomatic scandal. Starting in August , amid preparations for the first French presidential visit to China by Georges Pompidou, which was to take place the following month, the Chinese government began to demand that the French government halt filming.
The French repeatedly refused, citing principles of freedom of expression, even as they worried that the comedy threatened warming diplomatic and trade relations between the two countries. This article argues that Paris, as Yanne himself bragged, was indeed "a l'heure chinoise" from fall to winter , thanks not only to the director's transformation of the capital into an outpost of a Chinese empire but also to the live, color media coverage that played up the warmth of Franco-Chinese relations during Pompidou's September visit.
These two seemingly disparate events shed light on one another and, more generally, on how the French viewed China during this pivotal time in both nations' history. Historians and literary scholars have largely neglected the engagement of popular and mass culture--whether in film, television, literature, or the news--in the wave of French interest in China and Maoism in the first years of the s.
