The Ecological Origins of the Yan'an Way

Abstract

The 'Yan'an Way' is commonly understood as the set of mobilization strategies which emerged from the Chinese Communist Party's rectification drive of 1941-42. In the view of many analysts, these strategies laid the foundation for the Communists' victory in 1949. Mark Selden's pathbreaking 1971 study argued that the Yan'an Way had its origins in a populist 'impulse' within the Communist movement, an impulse which resurfaced among the Party leadership in response to the crises of 1940-41: it was an approach to rural development 'built on egalitarian foundations of participation and community' and was designed to create 'new forms of community'; itwas a strategy epitomized by the 'mass line' a 'mobilization style of leadership' which rejected elitism and bureaucratism.1 The Yan'an Way, Selden argued, was embodied in a series of mass campaigns launched by the Party after 1942, especially the great production drive of 1943-44. More recent scholarship challenges this interpretation on two fronts. The first is its heavy emphasis on the populist features of the Party's post-1942 mobilization methods. Most scholars now agree that any populism in the Yan'an Way was, at best, just one side of a multi-faceted strategy, and that he authoritarianism and state-strengthening ambitions of Communist mobilizers, even in the halcyon Yan'an years, are fairly obvious.2 Secondly, Selden's