Entry tags:

alternate history, china, clash of civilizations, diasporas, france, immigration

[BRIEF NOTE] Les chinois sont à Brest, c'est trop tard.
Back in 2005, I was taken by a passage in John Lukacs's 1992 The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age.

In 1943, Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote that the German army at the Volga was the last bulwark of Europe; after that the deluge, les Chinois à Brest. He meant not Brest-Litovsk on the Polish-Russian frontier but Brest at the westernmost tip of Brittany, of Europe. He lamented that the Germans lost the battle at Stalingrad and that their retreat westward then began (45-46).

As the various commenters noted, Céline was simply counting Russians as "Asians," perhaps as part of a general prejudice against Slavs, perhaps because he was imaginging something like Huntington's clash of civilizations. A pity, I suppose: I really liked the soc.history.what-if suggestion of Rich Rostrom that Céline's words, literally understood, could best realized by a Yuan Shikai with "the character and abilities of Mustafa Kemal or maybe Lee Kuan Yew or both and the useful elements of Chiang Kai-shek" who not only founds an energetic new state but modernizes with a vengeance. (Literally "modernizes with a vengeance," actually.)

But what's going on now? Not only has Brest become the twin city of China's Qingdao, but back in 2004 the French navy welcomed a Chinese flotilla around the destroyer Shenzhen led by the commander-in-chief of the East Sea Fleet. This all is part of a grimmer picture, as not only do up to a half-million people of Chinese background live in France, but many of these people are daring to become politically active. The French tourist industry is even starting to depend on the arrival of Chinese.

Céline would weep.