Claude Cadart

Claude Cadart (;

In the early 1960s, Cadart became a researcher at the (CERI) of Sciences Po and dedicated himself to the study of contemporary China. At a time when many sinologists considered Mao Zedong a visionary leader, Cadart cautioned that Mao's political campaigns, most notably the Cultural Revolution, were not the liberation or left movements that many European leftists had envisioned, but were merely political machinations for maintaining his own power. Peng had been expelled from the CCP for supporting Trotskyism and fled to France with his family after the CCP victory in the Chinese Civil War. Cadart and Cheng organized, translated into French, and published the memoirs of Peng Shuzhi, which exposed an aspect of Communist China little known to the outside world at the time. After Mao's death in 1976 and the advent of the Deng Xiaoping era, Cadart assisted Cheng with her book Dégel de l’intelligence en Chine.

Cadart died in Paris on 4 May 2019, the centenary of China's May Fourth Movement, at the age of 91.