Yan'an Communism Reconsidered

Abstract

The essential facts are clear. Twice defeated, routed from the revolutionary base areas they had constructed in the course of nearly a decade of guerrilla warfare and land revolution, on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Communist Party and its besieged army were essentially confined to a poor and peripheral area of the Northwest, having narrowly escaped extermination in the course of the Long March. Less than a decade later, Japanese armies in China had been fought to a standstill. By the time of their 1945 surrender, Mao's party-army held sway over almost 100 million people mainly in North, Northeast, and North Central China. In the course of the anti-Japanese resistance, the Communists forged a broad coalition of forces that administered and coordinated activities in widely dispersed rural base areas in China's interior. The base areas provided the springboard for nationwide victory in the subsequent civil war that ended in Guomindang defeat and establishment of the People's Republic. These facts are clear, yet explanations for the Communist victory and assessments of the character of the movement remain the subject of controversy. This article assesses major interpretations of the wartime resistance since the 1940s and concludes with a critical reassessment of the Yan'an Way as a framework for assessing the revolutionary praxis both of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region and of the wider wartime Communist movement. Research for the book The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Selden, 1971) was conducted during the 1960s, prior to access by