emily’s Reviews > The Paris Commune: A Global History > Status Update

‘—they still had—memories of—Taiping episode, 1851–64, which had led to widespread secessionism in the south of the Empire in the name of Christian values. In other words—from the Chinese perspective—news from Europe—& notably the Paris Commune—provided an opportunity—reinvested w/ the interplay of wholly different tensions. The situation in Algeria—somewhat similar—the transition—its struggles—dynamics intersected—’

‘Here I will discuss the cases of China & Algeria—visible in the archives—of how these events played out on both sides of imperial domination—caught up in other power relations, retranslated into these spaces, and became part of other regional histories. Let us start with the ‘affair’ of the Tientsin, 1870—the mandarins involved had been exiled—primarily because they had tried to escape the wrath of their sovereign.’

‘Questions remain. Some are simple: Who were these men & women? What did they do? What did they want? Some are more general: How can we explain the fact that, despite everything, these seventy-two days had such a significant political & symbolic impact in the twentieth & twenty-first centuries, and on the national, European and global scales? March 1871, the interpreter Zhang Deyi noted what he had seen in Paris—’