“Too Soon to Tell”: The Hundred-Year Odyssey of the Famous Quip on the French Revolution

Abstract

The popular anecdote that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai once declared it “too soon to tell” the significance of the French Revolution of 1789 is clearly recognizable as a meme and has followed a winding path through media history. While the story was seemingly debunked in 2011, when it was revealed that Zhou had meant the 1968 unrest in Paris—rather than the French Revolution—it is argued this was merely another stage in its hundred-year evolution. Regardless of whether the quip had an actual Chinese author or not, its early spread in mainstream media was the result of an educated and globally minded Western audience shaped by orientalism and rhetoric surrounding the dangers of radical revolution. This study examines how, when China began opening to the world in the 1970s, the people involved in this process began to be written into the meme, with the Zhou Enlai variant only becoming consolidated in the 1990s. In tracing the story’s development, this article examines how quips—or memes—propagate and evolve over time, particularly in pre-digital environments, where texts benefit from the interplay of different formats and genres.