This anthology of articles selected by Martine Morier and introduced by Michel Bonnin with a foreword by Marie-Claire Bergère is a good overview of Lucien Bianco's works from 1972 to 2008. With the re-publishing of Bianco's classic work, Les origines de la révolution chinoise, just a couple of years before, attention is increasingly being drawn to the impressive research of this historian of the Chinese revolution.

Few specialists of contemporary China can have the works they wrote more than four decades ago reprinted without blushing. Lucien Bianco belongs to this very special category. Most probably, the reason lies in his fascination with the daily life of the Chinese peasantry, which was at the origin of his interest in the history of the Chinese Revolution and which prevented this Sinologist of peasant descent from getting carried away by the ideological frenzy of the last three decades of the 20th century. Whether he writes on demography, on the Great Leap Forward or on Mao Zedong's revolutionary zeal, Lucien Bianco asks the same question: did it improve the lot of Chinese peasants?

This great historian of the Chinese revolution, who emphasized the importance of nationalism as a factor that enabled the Communists to defeat the Kuomintang, tells us candidly in his postscript to the new edition of The Origins of the Chinese Revolution, that he, who hated nationalism, had to spend his life researching a polity which had nationalism as its main component. This demonstrates Bianco's honesty and rigour: he never got carried away by his philosophical or political ideas and was always respectful of reality. This is one reason why he was not, unlike many of his contemporaries, an adulator of the Cultural Revolution and also why, more paradoxically, he wrote what now looks like a very balanced view of the Great Helmsman: “the result [of Mao's action] remains: at the very least, he slowed down the progression of inequalities and the embedding of a new ruling class” (p. 81). In his 1979 evaluation of Maoism (“Essai de définition du maoïsme,” An attempt to define Maoism, first published in Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 34 [5]), Bianco wrote: “This [democratic] temptation is Mao's (with a few exceptions, the other leaders have been quite typical Leninists), whereas national-communism has been common to all the leaders” (p. 95). After stating that Mao never hesitated to use violence to repress the revolutionaries that he had aroused, Bianco stressed that “the denunciation of the ‘three great inequalities’ is right on target.”

But his characterization of the regime is quite severe: “Oligarchy moderated by despotism: here is, in practice, the Maoist solution to the Leninist dilemma” (p. 101). In his conclusion, with impressive foresight, Bianco writes that most probably, citizens discontented with the new reformist line will use Mao's thought to denounce the regime: “The claim for freedom will be stated in the name of a failed despotism against a successful despotism” (p. 106). But what is most striking in Bianco's work is the seriousness of his research. Not a single word is written without a reference to its source. However severe his judgment of the regime and his sympathy for the farmers may be, this historian has no illusion about the peasantry's ability to trigger a regime change after the demise of Mao. When, in 1993 (“L'agitation paysanne menace-t-elle le régime?” [“Does peasant unrest threaten the regime?”] Perspectives chinoises, 17–18, July-August 1993), he wrote on the riots that had shaken China, he concluded: “Not any more than yesterday do [peasant riots] threaten the regime. They did not topple the old regime. The Communists did. I already hear the objection: ‘the Communists helped by the peasants’ … In any case, there is no opposition force today that is comparable to what the communists were half a century ago” (p. 146).

Bianco's latest book will also serve to remind younger scholars of the conditions in which research on China was done during the 1960s and 1970s. His article entitled “A journey in a jar” shows how, in the 1970s, travellers to China were subjected to punctilious control by the authorities, and how the smallest walk out of the group triggered long criticism sessions. At that time, it was impossible to have a sincere conversation with an ordinary Chinese citizen who had not been selected by the Party. Many specialists accepted to be taken (for a ride?) by the authorities, so happy were they to have the opportunity to visit China. But, as Lucien Bianco shows, the most disobedient refused, and, at the risk of being treated as “enemies,” they pursued the real China, and were able to show how shrewd they were. It often takes some courage to be able to approach the truth.

In conclusion, it is a pity that many of the articles presented in La révolution fourvoyée have not been translated into English and remain unknown to the general scholarly public in the world.