The Long March

Beauvoir and Sartre travelled to China in September 1955 as guests of the Chinese People's Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries — a state-sponsored trip in a period when the People's Republic was actively courting Western left intellectuals for propaganda purposes. Their delegation moved through Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Canton, and villages in between over roughly two months, with official minders, planned itineraries, and staged access. Beauvoir did no reading in Chinese, spoke no Chinese, and worked from Chinese-government-provided figures, French-translated Chinese-government texts, and interviews conducted through interpreters. She was aware of the mediation and does at points acknowledge it; the book's central problem, in hindsight, is how much of what she was shown she took at face value.

The book was published by Gallimard in November 1957 in a print run of ten thousand, unusually large for a Beauvoir nonfiction title. Austryn Wainhouse's English translation, The Long March: An Account of Modern China, appeared from World Publishing in Cleveland in 1958 and from André Deutsch in London the same year. The book was widely reviewed on both sides of the Cold War: the Communist and left French press praised it, Raymond Aron and other liberal French critics dismissed it as a credulous tour report, the Anglo-American reception was mixed and by 1960 firmly negative. Beauvoir was defensive about the book in Force of Circumstance (1963) and did not repudiate its argument, but she rarely returned to Chinese subjects and admitted in later interviews that the trip had shown her what she had wanted to see.

In 2026 the book is read primarily as a document of the Western intellectual response to Maoism between 1949 and 1966 — the same period that produced the visits and books by Han Suyin, Simon Leys's later riposte Les Habits neufs du président Mao (1971), and the broader French Maoist moment of the 1960s and 1970s. La Longue marche is one of the founding texts of that response and one of the earliest to which the historical record has been unkind. It is on Beauvoir's shelf as the piece of her nonfiction that most demands to be read with the primary-source discipline she urged elsewhere. It is honest about what an invited delegation could and could not see, and it is honest about the political sympathy that shaped the writing. It is not honest, because it could not be honest, about the state that was hosting her.

The book opens with several hundred pages of historical and political context on China from the late Qing collapse through the 1911 revolution, the warlord period, the Kuomintang, the Long March of 1934–35 (from which the book takes its title), and the establishment of the People's Republic in October 1949. Beauvoir's aim is to make the political situation legible to a French reader who has no prior background — and, implicitly, to argue that the People's Republic is the political heir of the anti-imperialist and modernising struggle of the previous century, not a Soviet imposition.

The middle section moves through observed daily life: peasant work and the land reform, industrial cities, the family, the position of women, education and literacy programmes, culture and the arts, religion. Each chapter combines Beauvoir's direct observations with the Chinese-government figures she was given, and each closes with a comparative judgment against pre-revolutionary conditions.

The concluding chapters argue that the revolution's achievements — literacy, women's legal equality, agrarian reform, the elimination of famine — outweighed the political costs Beauvoir acknowledges (the ongoing suppression of counter-revolutionaries, the control of speech, the absence of political pluralism), and that Western intellectuals had a responsibility to defend the People's Republic against Cold War distortion. It is these chapters that the historical record has treated most severely.