In 1928, Sheng Cheng, a work-study student who had studied and worked in France for eight years, published a book in French, titled Ma mère, to which Paul Valéry wrote a sixteen-page preface. Contrary to Valéry’s interpretation, this Francophone work was scarcely intended to illuminate the essence of Chinese life or stimulate East-West civilizational exchange. While cultural intermediaries active in the Sino-Western contact zone frequently concerned themselves with issues of East-West communication, world civilization, and the commonality of the human spirit, Chinese Francophone intellectuals of the early twentieth century also increasingly devoted themselves to the question of the self. Their use of the French language, rather than solely addressing an external audience, whether French or Chinese, or communicating a value-imbued, coherent message, also served to constitute an internal dialogue. This talk demonstrates that Ma mère, by delving into the most personal experiences and intimate relationships that shaped selfhood while negotiating the deepest pain, fear, and hope embedded in life and death, mostly functioned as Sheng Cheng’s Francophone journal intime (private diary). Writing in French shielded him from the May Fourth discourses and the sense of intellectual responsibility that had dominated his views, relationships, and communication, transporting him into a new linguistic, literary, and cultural milieu. This milieu, and its linguistic agency in particular, has been neglected in previous research on the work-study movement specifically and on Sino-Western cultural and educational exchanges more broadly.

Dr Vivienne Xiangwei Guo is a senior lecturer in modern Chinese history in the History Department of King’s College London. Her research focuses on the intellectual, political, and cultural history of modern China, particularly the history of China’s intellectual elites in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first monograph, Women and Politics in Wartime China (Routledge, 2018), examines the political networks of Chinese elite women during the Second World War and their roles in promoting ‘national resistance and reconstruction’ from the 1930s to the 1950s. Her second monograph, Negotiating a Chinese Federation (Brill, 2022), studies how Chinese warlords and intellectuals engaged with one another in the making of a Chinese federation between 1919 and 1923. Her recent research explores the history of the learning and use of French among Chinese intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Integrating the concepts, methods and approaches intrinsic to sociolinguistics and cultural linguistics into historical studies, she aims to shed new light on the relationship between foreign languages, ideas, and identity within a transnational context.