This paper does not come back on the intellectual aspects of the influence of French thinkers on Chinese revolutionary thought,or on the political and military dealings of Sun Yat-sen with French authorities.These issues have been documented and discussedby previous research.The purpose here is to survey the personal and political contacts made by Chineserevolutionaries with French republicans on the basis of some unused or newly available material.The contacts which I investigate were made not in China,where French residents were few, and most of them not interested in politics,or very cautious about connections with revolutionaries,but in Hanoi and inParis.From this interplay emerged,on Chinese side,a small group of young politicians who held some distinctive views about the fundamentals of a republican regime, and on French side,a kind of"Chinese lobby",which came to play an active role in Sino-French relations after 1911,in support of enhancing the international status of China.
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