Fifty years ago, Alain Peyrefitte published Quand la Chine s'éveila... The world will tremble.
The book is the result of a fact-finding mission carried out in the summer of 1971. China was just beginning its exit from the Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Tse-tung's dazibao of June 5, 1966. For the rest of the world, it was perfectly opaque, masking behind a great ideological wall the intensity of the...