It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Professor Jean-Luc Domenach, former Director of CERI from 1985 to 1994. 

A distinguished researcher, sinologist, and leading intellectual, he played a decisive role in shaping CERI's development and standing through his scholarship and institutional commitment. 

Access our special page, on our CERILab website.

The following text is the English translation of an article by Stéphanie Balme for the French journal Esprit, 13 January 2026.

Professor Jean-Luc Domenach (1945–2026): From China to the World

Research Professor Jean-Luc Domenach passed away on 8 January 2026, in the week following the intervention of the Trump administration in Venezuela. He was born on 11 August 1945, in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than eighty years separate these two dates, measured both against the scale of a life devoted to research, teaching, and public engagement, and against that of a world he never ceased to investigate through its ruptures and continuities: the recurrent forms of American imperialism, the rise of China to a central position on the global chessboard, and the increasingly uncertain place of Europe. These are issues that his work and public interventions continue to help us understand with renewed acuity.

The passing of Professor Jean-Luc Domenach deeply saddens our laboratory, CERI (the Centre for International Studies of Sciences Po/CNRS), which he directed from 1985 to 1994. Far beyond our institution, his death affects several generations of researchers, students, and readers whom he inspired through his work, particularly on Maoism and Asia. It marks the loss of a rigorous scholar for whom the study of modern and contemporary China was never a purely academic pursuit, but an intellectual and moral trial: a mirror reflecting our collective ignorance of the world and, ultimately, an invitation to question Western categories of political analysis at their very core. Professor Domenach also belonged to a humanist intellectual tradition, notably through his father, Jean-Marie Domenach, a major figure of the French journal Esprit. This legacy constituted a driving force for him: a critical humanism attentive to abuses of power and ideological blindness.

I was myself formed within this intellectual tradition by him and by Professor Guy Hermet, a specialist in Latin America who preceded him as Director of CERI from 1976 to 1985. Both were my doctoral supervisors and held one another in deep mutual respect. I now have the honour of directing this research centre, which has since become resolutely global in its scope and composition, with particular attention to the Global South and to innovative research methods, topics, and approaches.

Before becoming an academic, Jean-Luc Domenach was a diplomat, posted in Tokyo and later in Hong Kong. This formative experience firmly anchored him in an empirical understanding of East Asia and of its emerging centrality in world affairs. An alumnus of Sciences Po and INALCO (the French Institute of Oriental Studies), he initially trained in history and international relations before turning to comparative politics and sinology. This trajectory, closely intertwining analysis and action, already foreshadowed his decisive contribution to CERI. There, he worked at the heart of the major transformations of the post-Cold War era, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the early hopes associated with democratic transitions, alongside figures such as Professor Pierre Hassner and Professor Jacques Rupnik, future directors of the centre, and ourselves, his final generation of doctoral students.

Trained by a distinguished generation of historians of China, Jean-Luc Domenach wrote, under the supervision of Professor Lucien Bianco, a monograph entitled The Origins of the Great Leap Forward, devoted to Henan Province. He later earned his Doctorate at the EHESS under the supervision of Professor Marie Claire Bergère, with a major dissertation entitled Repression and Confinement in the People’s Republic of China (1948–1989). These pioneering works already outlined the central thread of his entire intellectual project: to apprehend Communist China through the history of its political violence and to trace the formation of a post-imperial one-party-state-army.

Among his many books, The Origins of the Great Leap Forward (1982) remains an international reference. Ten years later, China: The Forgotten Archipelago played a decisive role for an entire generation of readers and scholars in France and beyond. Intellectually faithful to his father’s commitment, who had supported the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in Western Europe, Jean-Luc Domenach took up the metaphor of the archipelago to reveal the Chinese system of forced labour camps, the Laogai（劳改）. This book, following in the wake of Simon Leys’s work, powerfully contributed to situating Maoist China within a broader reflection on totalitarianism, at a time when large segments of Western intellectual life still regarded China as singular and therefore incomparable. After several books marked by sometimes intense debates with other leading sinologists of his generation, notably Jean Philippe Béja, François Godement, and Yves Chevrier, he returned to his central object, Chinese communism and its contemporary legacies, with Mao, His Court and His Conspiracies (2012), followed by The Sons of Princes (2016). His final book, Reflections on the Transformations of the Chinese Gulag (1949–2022), returned to the evolution of the Laogai, three decades after his first major study of the subject. At the time, in Beijing, Xi Jinping announced his long-term consolidation of power through the launch of the “Belt and Road Initiative”.

In 2002, at the time of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, Jean-Luc Domenach joined Tsinghua University, where he created a Franco-Chinese experimental centre in the social sciences and humanities. He remained there with his family until 2007, a few months before the Beijing Olympic Games and the publication of Charter 08, a manifesto calling for democratic and constitutional reform in China, which earned its principal inspirer, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. In this tightly monitored academic and political environment, he tirelessly created, together with us, and notably with Jean-Louis Rocca, spaces of intellectual breathing in Beijing: informal meetings, long dinners, and debates conducted exclusively in Putonghua. These seminars sometimes unsettled the Tsinghua administration. More fundamentally, he contributed to enhancing the visibility and legitimacy of the Chinese social sciences within a university increasingly obsessed with rankings, first in the life sciences and today in artificial intelligence.

As director, Professor Domenach profoundly transformed CERI. He strengthened its international openness, asserted interdisciplinarity within the social sciences, and placed the analysis of scales and actors, from the local to the global, at the heart of a refined understanding of comparative politics. In this way, the laboratory developed its distinctive capacity to articulate area studies with the study of global issues in international relations. He was also the one who opened the centre to the wider public sphere, forging lasting collaborations with non-academic publishers and mainstream media.

Jean-Luc Domenach was also, and perhaps above all, our professor in the fullest sense of the term. Able to captivate an entire lecture hall with his charisma, he taught the art of decentring, reminding us that “seen from Beijing, Paris can become anecdotal.” He insisted on the rigorous passage from the analysis of domestic political regimes to that of their foreign policies. Yet he consistently refused to establish a school of thought, convinced that any form of academic mandarinate ultimately dulls critical thinking. This choice sometimes left us alone in learning our craft, but it made us responsible and therefore genuinely free.

Our grief is profound, for both the man and the intellectual who has left us. Yet it is inseparable from immense gratitude.

Thank you for your dedication, 感谢您的奉献, and rest in peace, 安息, dear Professor, dear Jean-Luc.

Stéphanie BALME