The Ecological Origins of the Yan'an Way

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