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From one China to another* 7 never stop returning and who never go, the mandarins who take flight, and the generals who flee. Those who are making History have never seen the great imperial cities; they only know the mountains and the fields; in the fields and in the mountains, the destiny of China has been decided. For the first time, a capital awaits the pleasure of the country. History will appear in the form of a procession of peasants. Townspeople think of the country as an inert space which links the towns and which is crossed and devastated by armies until, in the towns, they have decided to make peace. But suddenly it reveals itself: it is living flesh, muscle; within this muscle, the towns are lodged like grains of urate.Yet the crowds are not afraid. Up there, the eye of America is spinning round in panic. But on the ground they have known for a long time that the communists have won. The rich curse Chiang Kai-shek as much as Mao Tse-tung. The peasants want to go back home: since everything is in the hands of the communists, they might as well go and meet them in the villages as in the towns. The workers and the poor begin to hope; the thousand individual waits of the time of Repetition have come together and fused in a single hope. The rest of the population march in processions and pray for peace: for any peace. It is a way of killing time. Before joining the bonzes and burning paper wands, they make the most of the opportunity to put their personal affairs in order. They go and rub the nose of an idol, for their own benefit; infertile girls press their stomachs against the stomachs of statues; after the ceremony, in the large pharmacy near the temple, people will be buying dried pellets which restore ardour to listless husbands and which warm the feet of wives. As long as the authorities remain at their post, the crowd stays under pressure. The police surround it and contain it; but, unlike ours, they rarely strike: this policeman is getting impatient because they are hemming him in too tightly. He lifts his leg: is he going to kick out? No, he stamps in a puddle; having been splashed, the people will step back. But the gentlemen of the Kuomintang will not stay in place; they go off. There are a thousand left; a hundred left. Soon there will be none. The gentlemen who cannot leave, yellow men and white men, are pale with fear. During the period of transition, the base instincts of the population will be let loose: there will be pillaging, rape and murder. As a result the bourgeois of Shanghai pray for the communists to come; any kind of order rather than the fury of the people. This time it is all over. The important people have left, the last policeman has disappeared; the bourgeoisie and the populace alone remain in the city. Will there be pillaging or not? Admirable crowds – when they no longer felt the weight of the burden that was crushing them, they hesitated for a moment and then, little by little, became decompressed; great masses return to a gaseous state. Look at the photographs; everybody has started to run. Where are they going? Pillaging? Not even that; they have entered the fine, abandoned houses and have scavenged, just as, only yesterday, they scavenged in the piles of rubbish. What have they taken? Practically nothing: the floorboards to make a fire. All is calm; let them come now, the peasants from the north: they will find an orderly city. Remember June 1940, and those funereal giants who raced across a deserted Paris in their lorries and their tanks? Now, that was picturesque: not much voluptuousness, but blood and death, and a lot of pomp. The Germans wanted a ceremonious victory. That is what they had, and the handsome SS officers, standing on camouflaged vehicles, looked
Colonialism and Neocolonialism 8 like priests, like executioners, like martyrs, like Martians, like anything except men. Now open the album. Children and youths are massed along the path of the victors; they are amused, curious; calm, they cross their arms and watch. Where is the victory? Where is the terror? Here is the first communist soldier seen in Shanghai since the beginning of the civil war. He is a little man with a dark, handsome face, who is carrying his equipment on the end of a stick, like our old soldiers when they came back from the war. This exhausted little man, these young spectators: you might think that you were at the finish of a running race. Turn the page and now look at the soldiers of the Eighth Army from behind, beneath their sunshades, lost on one of Shanghai’s main avenues. Have these peasants taken the city, or will the city take them? They sit down. On the road or on the pavement, at the very spot where, only the day before, a seated crowd awaited them. That crowd has stood up and pushed up against them, dominating them with its size and looking at them. Usually, victors hide in order to rest; but it appears that these men are not interested in intimidating. Yet they are the ones who defeated the Kuomintang troops, armed by the Americans, they are the ones who held the Japanese army in check. They seem crushed by the tall buildings which surround them. The war is over; the peace must be won. The photos express wonderfully the solitude and the anguish of these peasants in the heart of a magnificent and rotting city. Behind their blinds, the gentlemen take heart: ‘We will lead them by the nose.’ It did not take very long for those gentlemen to change their minds. But that is another story, one that Cartier-Bresson does not tell us. Let us thank him for being able to show us the most human of victories, the only one that we can love without reservation.
- Page 2: Colonialism and Neocolonialism Firs
- Page 5 and 6: First published 1964 in French, as
- Page 7 and 8: Contents Acknowledgements vii Prefa
- Page 9 and 10: Preface Sartre: the ‘African Phil
- Page 11 and 12: Nothingness (1943), Sartre rejects
- Page 13 and 14: want you to feel, as I, the sensati
- Page 15 and 16: population in France, had adopted.
- Page 17 and 18: Marxism and the charting of psychol
- Page 19 and 20: hitherto, by the knowledge criteria
- Page 21 and 22: Introduction Remembering Sartre Azz
- Page 23 and 24: that the ‘French soldiers are mas
- Page 25 and 26: martyr’ (this volume, p. 200). Sa
- Page 27 and 28: and practical affirmation of white
- Page 29 and 30: of the Algerian War. In this proces
- Page 31 and 32: 33 Ibid., p. 135. 34 Ibid., p. 226.
- Page 33 and 34: Colonialism and Neocolonialism 2 Ca
- Page 35 and 36: Colonialism and Neocolonialism 4 co
- Page 37: Colonialism and Neocolonialism 6 to
- Page 41 and 42: Colonialism and Neocolonialism 10 T
- Page 43 and 44: Colonialism and Neocolonialism 12 y
- Page 45 and 46: in 1940, 250 kilos; in 1945, 200 ki
- Page 47 and 48: Colonialism and Neocolonialism 16 F
- Page 49 and 50: Colonialism and Neocolonialism 18 c
- Page 51 and 52: Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and
- Page 53 and 54: Colonialism and Neocolonialism 22 d
- Page 55 and 56: You Are Wonderful * 1 A collection
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- Page 81 and 82: The Frogs Who Demand a King * The
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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 8<br />
like priests, like executioners, like martyrs, like Martians, like anything except men. Now<br />
open the album. Children and youths are massed along the path of the victors; they are<br />
amused, curious; calm, they cross their arms and watch. Where is the victory? Where is<br />
the terror? Here is the first communist soldier seen in Shanghai since the beginning of the<br />
civil war. He is a little man with a dark, handsome face, who is carrying his equipment on<br />
the end of a stick, like our old soldiers when they came back from the war. This<br />
exhausted little man, these young spectators: you might think that you were at the finish<br />
of a running race. Turn the page and now look at the soldiers of the Eighth Army from<br />
behind, beneath their sunshades, lost on one of Shanghai’s main avenues. Have these<br />
peasants taken the city, or will the city take them? They sit down. On the road or on the<br />
pavement, at the very spot where, only the day before, a seated crowd awaited them. That<br />
crowd has stood up and pushed up against them, dominating them with its size and<br />
looking at them. Usually, victors hide in order to rest; but it appears that these men are<br />
not interested in intimidating. Yet they are the ones who defeated the Kuomintang troops,<br />
armed by the Americans, they are the ones who held the Japanese army in check. They<br />
seem crushed by the tall buildings which surround them. The war is over; the peace must<br />
be won. The photos express wonderfully the solitude and the anguish of these peasants in<br />
the heart of a magnificent and rotting city. Behind their blinds, the gentlemen take heart:<br />
‘We will lead them by the nose.’<br />
It did not take very long for those gentlemen to change their minds. But that is another<br />
story, one that Cartier-Bresson does not tell us. Let us thank him for being able to show<br />
us the most human of victories, the only one that we can love without reservation.
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