China in Revolution

Yenan Way Revisited

Mark Selden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315286396
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Originally published in the early 1970s, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China has proved to be one of the most significant and enduring books published in the field. In this new critical edition of that seminal work, Mark Selden revisits the central themes therein and reconsiders them in light of major new theoretical and documentary understandings of the Chinese communist revolution.

1

Shensi Province: The Revolutionary Setting

“Of all the Provinces of China,” observed O.J. Todd, “probably Shensi comes the nearest to being a liability. Certainly she is no great asset to any country as she lies there like a dying beggar in as distressful condition as she was just after the Mohammedan Rebellion [1862–1873] 50 years ago.”¹

Two millennia earlier the Kuan-chung region bisecting Shensi province and centered on the rich Wei River plain formed the cradle of a dynamic civilization. Well fortified against attack and strategically located as the natural corridor between North China and Central Asia, the area provided a nucleus from which the dynamic radiating power of early Chinese civilization would expand to create a unified empire.²

Three major dynasties eventually rose from power bases originating in this region. Ch’ang-an, in the area of modern Sian, repeatedly served as the imperial capital, center and symbol of the splendor of empire. But already more than a thousand years ago, even as T’ang dynasty (618–906) Ch’ang-an was the proud capital of the world’s most cosmopolitan civilization, the Kuan-chung region was declining. As the balance of economic and political power shifted to the prosperous and populous rice-growing regions of South and Central China, a process of disintegration set in which would continue into the twentieth century.

The Kuan-chung area is the heart of the loess highlands which extend across more than 200,000 square miles in half a dozen provinces in North and Northwest China.³ The almost surrealistic visual quality of the loess dominating this region is vividly described by the nineteenth-century German traveler Baron von Richtofen. Passing through the Wei River valley, he observed that “As far as the eye can see … all this is loess. We are here at the very center of the loess region. Everything is yellow. The hills, the roads, the fields, the water of the rivers and brooks are yellow, the houses are made of yellow earth, the vegetation is covered with yellow dust … even the atmosphere is seldom free from a yellow haze.”⁴ The fertile loess with its ability to hold moisture provided the setting for the initial development of Chinese agriculture. Dry crops such as wheat and millet were readily cultivated in the light loess soil of the plains, but the area’s marginal and unpredictable rainfall placed severe strictures on its wealth-producing capacity.⁵

Journeying north from the Wei valley toward Yenan, the traveler enters sparsely populated, rugged, and inaccessible loess hills. Here in northern Shensi below the Great Wall other properties of the loess contribute to the plight of a region unsurpassed in its poverty and primitiveness in twentieth-century rural China. With its forest cover and the loess itself long eroded or destroyed by man, its steep hills provide marginal and unstable prospects for subsistence farming. In 1936 the American journalist Edgar Snow described the area this way:

North Shensi was one of the poorest parts of China I had seen…. The farms of Shensi may be described as slanting and many of them also as slipping, for landslides are frequent. The fields are mostly patches laid on the serried landscape between crevices and small streams. The land seems rich enough in many places, but the crops grown are strictly limited by the steep gradients, both in quantity and quality. There are few genuine mountains, only endless broken hills, hills as interminable as a sentence by James Joyce, and even more tiresome. Yet the effect is often strikingly like Picasso, the sharp-angled shadowing and colouring changing miraculously with the sun’s wheel, and towards dusk it becomes a magnificent sea of purpled hilltops with dark velvety folds running down, like the pleats on a mandarin skirt, to ravines that seem bottomless.⁶

Above all, the remoteness and inaccessibility of the north Shensi area shaped conditions of life in the loess hills. George B. Cressey’s description of communication difficulties in the loess areas applied with particular force to northern Shensi: “Many loess regions are impassable if one does not keep to the established roads. These roads form one of the distinctive features of the country. Each passing cart or pack animal stirs up the loess, which is so light that it easily rises in clouds. As a result of this continuous removal of material plus the wash of rains, some of the roads or trails come to be veritable canyons, of a width just sufficient to permit the passage of one vehicle and with almost perpendicular walls which rise overhead for as much as forty feet or more.”⁷ With few roads, many of them frequently washed out, commerce and communications among the small scattered settlements of the loess hills and between the region and other parts of China were at best primitive and sporadic. Almost without exception transportation was limited to pack animals traveling over precipitous mountain trails.

Remote from major provincial power centers, this rugged terrain long provided ideal sanctuary for roving armed bands. Here Li Tzu-ch’eng launched his campaign to overthrow the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), only to be thwarted by the Manchus after briefly taking Peking in 1644. Much of the region was devastated by Moslem rebels and their Manchu army adversaries in the mid-nineteenth century. The Yenan area in particular seems to have suffered heavily from a combination of military and natural disasters. One account recalls the toll on the area as follows:

And then the spell of peace and prosperity was broken. In the third month of the sixth year of the Emperor Tung Chih [April 1866] a large Mohammedan army came. It had devastated all the towns on the route…. Happily Yenanfu was then well able to resist the rebels….

This was not done without the total depopulation and robbing of the whole countryside, and the crowding of this city with large numbers of people from other districts, involving a tremendous drain on local resources….

In the tenth Chinese month of the same year [November 1866] a branch of the Taiping rebel army reached Yenanfu…. It had completed the depopulation of the country, so thoroughly begun seven months earlier by the Mohammedans….

The city has never recovered from the devastating effects of the war and famine, far less has the surrounding country. Wild beasts have taken advantage of the absence of man. While the level country has been recultivated, and by gradual stages the wider mountain valleys are being won back, the narrower gullies are infested with leopards, wild boar, wolves, etc…. The whole Yenanfu area is therefore now one of the poorest in the whole of China.⁸

In the chaotic final years of the Ch’ing dynasty (1644–1911), from the ranks of the military, secret societies, and a population frequently on the brink of starvation, increasing numbers turned to banditry. In northern Shensi during the early decades of the twentieth century an uneasy balance of terror over the peasant population was maintained among “legitimate” warlord armies, landlord-sponsored local militia, and highly mobile armed rebels who swept down from the hills in swift plundering raids. As one twentieth-century British observer remarked, “In the mind of the average Chinese of the Eastern provinces … North Shensi is a nest of plunderers lost in a wilderness.”⁹ Chronic banditry in northern Shensi was a symptom, not the primary cause, of the misery of more than one million peasants striving to eke out a marginal existence in this area. Yet it in turn contributed to the further disintegration of the rural economy.

The Shensi Peasant and Rural Disintegration

Twentieth-century Shensi was the scene of profound rural crisis. Natural disaster and perpetual warlord-bandit strife compounded the burdens of rural poverty and oppression to exact a terrible toll in human lives. The overwhelming problems confronting the peasantry included famine, the destruction of war and banditry, chronic and worsening debt, accelerating tenancy, rising absentee landlordism, oppressive taxation, and desiccation of the soil. These conditions spelled the bankruptcy of a rural order incapable of meeting minimum needs of survival. Our concern here is the changing nature of socioeconomic relations in rural Shensi for the light it throws on subsequent patterns of revolution in the province. For this reason we focus on the areas of the Wei River valley and particularly the northern reaches of the province where revolutionary activity eventually achieved its most significant development.

Famine in the northwest was a periodic natural phenomenon, but it was a product too of a half a century of political collapse and incessant warfare which drained the resources and reserves of the countryside so that even minor natural calamities wrought immense suffering and loss of life. Successive warlord masters of the province engaged in perpetual fighting and relentlessly milked the peasant economy of the maximum revenues extortable. This meant taking much of the best land out of grain production and planting it in opium at a time when many peasants were already being forced to abandon their farms to take up the life of the bandit or soldier. Driving north from Sian toward Yenan in 1936, Edgar Snow observed:

Opium poppies nodded their swollen heads, ready for harvest, along the newly completed motor road—a road already deeply wrinkled with washouts and ruts so that at times it was scarcely navigable even for our six-ton Dodge truck. Shensi has long been a noted opium province. During the great Northwest Famine which a few years ago took a toll of 3,000,000 lives, American Red Cross investigators attributed much of the tragedy to the cultivation of the poppy, forced upon the peasants by tax-greedy militarists. The best land being devoted to the poppy, in years of drought there was a serious shortage of millet, wheat and corn, the staple cereals of the North-west.¹⁰

Political instability of the warlord era also led to the seizure of grain reserves for immediate consumption by the military. This was of course in addition to the economic dislocation brought on by the direct ravages of fighting and plundering. Stretched to the breaking point by these military and political facts of warlord life, the economy collapsed completely when faced with prolonged drought.

During the years 1928 to 1933 literally millions in Shensi province alone died of sheer starvation in the Great Northwest Famine. By 1929, the China International Famine Relief Commission estimated that two consecutive years of famine had brought about the death of 2,500,000 persons, almost one-third of the entire Shensi population. Another half-million had migrated to other provinces and countless others were forced to sell their homes and land. Thousands of women and children were sold into servitude and three consecutive bitter years lay ahead. Emergency efforts to alleviate the famine by importation of relief grain from East China were almost totally thwarted by transportation bottlenecks. There was neither a railroad nor a navigable river to carry grain across Shensi. Moreover, relief efforts frequently became enmeshed in squabbles among competing warlord factions. If the cost was hundreds of thousands of peasant lives, so much the worse in the calculus of the politics of the era.¹¹

The fact was that such morally and religiously inspired efforts as famine relief, whether under Chinese or foreign auspices, could not stand aloof from politics. Dimes and dollars funneled from thousands of congregations in America (for it was principally American dollars that financed the famine relief in the northwest after 1928) to save starving Chinese contributed to the perpetuation of warlord rule. Charity which might in the short run ease famine suffering thus served to shore up the political-military system which loomed as a major obstacle to the eradication of the root causes of the problem. In any event, efforts to ameliorate the suffering caused by the Great Northwest Famine were minuscule in contrast to the magnitude of the problem. Among the most striking results of the famine was the acceleration of a process of economic decline and rising tenancy.

Tenancy in North and Northwest China was a problem of secondary importance compared to its pervasive character in South and Central China.¹² However, a rural survey of Shensi conducted by the National government in the years 1928 to 1933, coincident with the Great Northwest Famine, highlights two important points: first, in parts of Shensi tenancy constituted a serious problem; second, one effect of the famine was to generate a wave of land mortgages and sales, primarily to absentee landlords. A League of Nations investigation disclosed that “In the famine of 1930 twenty acres of land could be purchased for three days’ food supply. Making use of this opportunity, the wealthy classes of the province [Shensi] built up large estates, and the number of owner-cultivators diminished.”¹³

Southern Shensi, as the northernmost portion of the rice-growing paddy region of Central China, had long been plagued by severe problems of tenancy. By contrast, in the rich agricultural area of the Wei valley, tenancy had been a minor problem compared to recurrent famine, debt, and warlord exactions on the peasant freeholders who comprised the overwhelming majority in this area. However, the Great Northwest Famine forced thousands, including rich peasants and small landlords, to sell or mortgage land to stave off immediate starvation, while tens of thousands died and many more migrated.¹⁴

Recurrent natural disaster and rebellion had taken a heavy toll in Shensi ever since the ravages of the nineteenth-century Taiping and Moslem rebellions and the famines of the 1870s and 1901. Famine simultaneously reduced the population and turned large areas into wasteland. Thus fertile valley land was rare and concentrated increasingly in the hands of landlords. Moreover, one significant result of famine and rebellion was to drive the landlords off the land to the city. As Hsiao Kung-chuan observes: “Even bef...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in the Notes, Equivalents for Weights and Measures, and Administrative Units
• 1. Shensi Province: The Revolutionary Setting
• 2. Rebels and Revolutionaries in the Northwest
• 3. From Land Revolution to United Front: The Shen-Kan-Ning Soviet, 1935–1936
• 4. The New Democracy in the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region, 1937–1941
• 5. Crisis and the Search for a New Order
• 6. The Yenan Way
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index