Yan'an and the Revolutionary Base Areas

Abstract

The field of base area studies grew, in part, out of the search by Western analysts to understand why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was able to defeat the Guomindang (GMD) and seize state power in 1949. The Cold War conspiracy and organizational weapon theories of the 1950s gave way in the early 1960s to Chalmers Johnson’s argument that, from 1937, the Party won the support of rural populations by tapping a “peasant nationalism.” Since Johnson, scholars have broadly agreed that the secret of CCP “success” lay in the resistance war period (1937–1945), but there has been a lot less agreement about how the Communists might have “appealed” to the peasants in that period. Lucien Bianco in 1967 argued the salience of socioeconomic appeals as well as nationalism, but stronger challenges to Johnson came from scholars such as Donald Gillin in 1964 and Mark Selden in 1971. Selden’s study of social revolution in a region that was never occupied by Japan was a strong reply to Johnson, but his Yenan Way model was itself challenged by scholars who could demonstrate that the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, with Yan’an (Yenan) as its capital, was very different from the rear-area bases. The challenges to both the peasant nationalism and Yenan Way arguments gave rise to the base area studies genre, a turn to local history that has been a broad trend in recent decades. A definitive feature of the genre has been the rejection of grand theory (monolithic explanations of the CCP success), a dereification of “the Party” and the partial de-Maoification of Party history, and a strong emphasis on the regional diversities that resulted from, for example, different ecologies, stages of development, proximity to war fronts, and local cultures. A major factor in the rapid growth of base area studies in the 1980s and 1990s was the progressive opening of Chinese archives beginning in 1978, the explosion of document-compilation work among Chinese researchers, and the collaborations between Chinese and Western scholars in base area research. The collaborations have served significantly to expand and enrich the scholarship in this field.