The Yan'an Way of Co-operativization

Abstract

In both Western and Chinese Communist historiography, the “Yan'an Way” has become tangled up in the Mao legend, and it has suffered accordingly. An aim of this article is to peel back the Maoist crust and re-examine the workings of the Yan'an Way during the period when it was developed, and in two different parts of the Yan'an base (the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region), the place from which the model was launched in the early 1940s. The subregional comparison is used to show that, in different sociopolitical contexts, the Yan'an Way worked quite differently, and that results in only one place provided material for the construction of an heroic legend. The rural co-operativization drive of 1943–44 is made the special focus of this study because it was a key component of the Yan'an Way and subsumes many of its most characteristic features.