Lucien Bianco is a French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 historian

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

 and sinologist specializing in the history of the Chinese peasantry in the twentieth century. He is the author of a reference book on the origins of the Chinese revolution and has co-edited the book China in the twentieth century. Its Peasants without the Party was awarded the Levenson in 2003.

Life

After attending high school Bianco enrolled in the École Normale Supérieure

École Normale Supérieure

The École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...

 and the École nationale des Langues orientales, where he learned Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

. In 1968 he obtained his degree in history from the University of Paris

University of Paris

The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

, where he wrote his thesis on the history of Thailand. He later spent time teaching at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, University of Michigan

University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

, Stanford, and in Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

 and Hongkong. For many years he was director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

The École des hautes études en sciences sociales is a leading French institution for research and higher education, a Grand Établissement. Its mission is research and research training in the social sciences, including the relationship these latter maintain with the natural and life sciences...

 in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 and taught at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris

Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris

The Institut d'études politiques de Paris , simply referred to as Sciences Po , is a public research and higher education institution in Paris, France, specialised in the social sciences. It has the status of grand établissement, which allows its admissions process to be highly selective...

.

The release of Bianco's 1967 book "Les origines de la révolution chinoise 1915-1949" proved to be highly influential in Chinese research in France and was translated into numerous languages, including English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, and Japanese.

In the 1960s and 1970s Bianco was an outpsoken critic of the government of China, and in particular Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

 and Cultural Revolution

Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...

. Peter Bernard Harris praised Bianco's stance, staing that "Professor Lucien Bianco has boldly asserted his opposition not merely to the Gang of Four

Gang of Four

The Gang of Four was the name given to a political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party officials. They came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution and were subsequently charged with a series of treasonous crimes...

 but, more particularly, to what he called 'Maologie.'" Bianco was also a critic of the 1973 Paris Peace Accord that ended the Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

 and joined a group of Asia

Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

n specialists who protested the agreement because of the treatment of political prisoner

Political prisoner

According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....

s the South Vietnamese government.

In 2003, Bianco's book Peasants Without the Party: Grassroots Movements in 20th-Century China won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize. In awarding the prize, the Association for Asian Studies

Association for Asian Studies

The Association for Asian Studies is a U.S. society focused on facilitating contact and information exchange among scholars of Asian fields. It is the self-proclaimed largest society of its kind. The Association consists of eminent Asianists, and is a non-profit organization...

praised Bianco's work as "a quarter-century of innovative and careful research about peasant discontent."

Works

• Les origines de la révolution chinoise 1915-1949. Paris : Gallimard, 1967.
• Peasants Without the Party: Grass-Roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China (Asia and the Pacific, Armonk, N.Y.) 2001
• Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949. Translated from French by Muriel Bell. 1971. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804708274.
• La Chine au XXe siècle. Paris : Fayard, 1990.
• La Chine. Un exposé pour comprendre, un essai pour réfléchir, Paris : Flammarion, 1994.
• Peasants Without the Party : Grass-Roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China, M.E. Sharpe, 2003.
• Jacqueries et Révolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle, Paris : La Martinière, 2005.