Deng's Years in France and the Soviet Union
How a teenage Deng Xiaoping left rural Sichuan for a work-study program in France, joined the Communist Party in Paris, and trained in Moscow before returning to revolutionary China.
The Work-Study Movement
In 1920, a sixteen-year-old Deng Xiaoping boarded a ship in Shanghai bound for Marseille. He was part of the Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement, a program that sent roughly 1,600 Chinese students to France between 1919 and 1921. The idea was simple: young Chinese would work in French factories to pay for their education, absorbing Western science and technology that could modernize China.
The reality was harsher. Most students found grueling factory work and little time for study. Deng worked at a Schneider-Creusot steel plant, a Renault automobile factory in Billancourt, and a rubber shoe factory in Montargis. The wages were low, the conditions were miserable, and racial prejudice against Chinese workers was common. Rather than turning these young men into Western-style modernizers, the experience radicalized many of them.
France proved to be a crucible for Chinese communism. Among the work-study students who became committed Marxists in France were Zhou Enlai, who would become Deng's lifelong ally and China's premier for 26 years, and Li Fuchun, a future economic planner. The European Branch of the Chinese Communist Party was formally established in Paris in 1922, and Deng joined it in 1924.
