On August 19, 1991, hardline Communist leaders staged a coup in Moscow to depose USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That evening, 4,000 miles to the east, Gao Hua, a thirty-seven-year-old Nanjing University lecturer listening intently to the coup leaders’ emergency announcements and stirring Soviet music blaring from an old transistor radio, penned the first words of the book that was to become How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945. Compelled by a sense of mission to write a true history of Yan'an, which has long been enshrined as one of the foundational myths of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Gao took great risks to write a book that might never see the light of day. “Had I worried about its publication, this book would not have been written at all,” Gao told independent documentary filmmaker Hu Jie and this reviewer in 2009. Speaking from his sickbed, he emphasized, “The long writing process was an exercise to free myself from fears and taboos in my heart.” That herculean task, however, had taken a toll on his health. Gao died of cancer on December 26, 2011, coincidentally the birthday of Mao, who had dominated the first twenty-two years of Gao's life and whose mythology he had committed himself to debunking. By writing about how the Red Sun (Mao) rose, Gao contributed to its fall, at least in historiography.
First published by the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong in 2000, this book has been reprinted twenty-two times in its traditional Chinese character version and nine times in its simplified Chinese edition. In the Chinese world, it has fundamentally transformed the scholarly understanding of the Rectification Movement and the Yan'an era. It is “widely known, broadly respected, and officially proscribed” in the PRC, as Joseph Esherick notes in the foreword (p. vii). Faithfully and lucidly translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian, the translators of Yang Jisheng's acclaimed Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, this 840-page English version is a complete rendition of Gao's monumental work, supplemented by the translators’ occasional explanatory footnotes.
As its title suggests, this book gives a detailed account of Mao's tortuous rise to supremacy in the CCP. Starting from his bloody campaign to eliminate the fictitious Anti-Bolshevik League in the Jiangxi Soviet base in 1930–31, which literally decimated the Red Army, to his subsequent marginalization by Soviet-trained Internationalists, then climaxing with the Yan'an Rectification Movement of 1942–44, the book concludes with Mao's final triumph over his rivals at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. The heart of the narrative is the Rectification Movement, the first Party-wide systemic purge and reorganization, during which Mao wielded his political power to achieve two goals: first, “to thoroughly reorganize the top echelons of the Party and to redistribute power so as to establish absolute dominance,” and second, “to thoroughly transform the Party's ‘Russified’ character and to remold the CCP in his own image” (pp. xv–xvi).
In sharp contrast to the Party line that describes the movement as a salubrious thought-reform process, to which much of the earlier Western scholarship subscribed,Footnote 1 Gao reminds readers that the relatively liberal Yan'an Spring was short-lived—less than two months long. Mao, first presenting himself as “a guardian of educated young people” and “a protector of the ‘little man,’” mobilized intellectuals to attack dogmatism, a code word for his Russian-trained rivals (pp. 339, 354). However, when Wang Shiwei appealed for equality and criticized Yan'an's rigid hierarchical system of provisions and privileges symbolized by “multiple grades of food and clothing,” Mao, in a whiplash move, turned his fire on liberalism (pp. 347, 353–54). The movement quickly shifted into a succession of increasingly suppressive stages: cadre examination, anti-spy purge, and “rescue.”
Starting with listening to lectures, studying twenty-two documents mostly written by Mao (but no Marxist classics), writing self-reflection journals, and making criticisms and self-criticisms, the requirements soon progressed to the imperative to “bare one's heart” to the CCP through repeatedly writing personal and family histories in excruciating detail and reporting all private thoughts and private conversations (the so-called “mini-broadcast”). Mao's innovation, Gao observes, “was in its melding of theoretical inculcation with brute intimidation, which, when accompanied by powerful organizational measures, imposed a formidable force on Party members in general and on intellectuals in particular” (p. 453). Under prolonged extreme pressure, individuals often broke physically, psychologically, intellectually, and socially. Many confessed to whatever their inquisitors demanded and falsely implicated others. The materials produced in this process were funneled into the newly developed personal dossier system and provided the basis for future persecutions and purges. This was probably the earliest systematic weaponization of personal data, long before the age of computing and “big data.”
Leading the campaign were Mao's two alter egos: the sadistic Kang Sheng and the disciplinarian Liu Shaoqi. Kang, the Soviet-trained secret police chief, perfectly outlined the campaign's logic: “the Rectification Movement must shift to cadre examinations, and the cadre examinations must shift to a campaign to eliminate counterrevolutionaries” (pp. 478, 497). He instigated the rampant use of torture, sleep and food deprivation, and mock executions to extract confessions (pp. 543–45). In contrast, Liu, who excelled at policy-making and implementation, disdained to do such “dirty work.” Nevertheless, Liu instructed cadres to “make more use of persuasion and enticement, or use the threat of exposing their [suspects’] personal secrets and so on” (pp. 534, 538). The result was astounding. According to Hu Qiaomu, Mao's secretary and ghostwriter, 15,000 “secret agents” were uncovered in Yan'an (p. 648), a small city with 7,000 local residents and some 30,000 CCP cadres in the early 1940s (p. 221).
“Mao never for a moment lost his authority,” as he closely directed the entire movement from above, alternating between didactic (wen) and suppressive (wu) approaches (pp. 499, 629). Instead of employing mass murder, as he had in 1930–31 and Stalin had in the Great Purge of 1936–38, Mao took a different tack toward suspects in Yan'an. When Kang Sheng's terror campaign caused widespread resentment, Mao intervened in August 1943 by issuing the policy of “kill none and arrest only a minority.” However, “kill none” only applied to “secret agents and turncoats who have come clean” (p. 650), while a small but unknown number of suspects were still executed or unaccounted for. “Arrest only a minority” was nothing more than a play on the word “arrest.” Mao stipulated an arbitrary scale of arrest: 10 percent of the suspects, who were considered “professional spies,” should be sent to prison; another 10 percent should be detained in “introspection” institutions; and the remaining 80 percent, who were “ordinary suspects,” should be interned within their work units to undergo investigation (pp. 630, 649). This pervasive use of extralegal detention facilities and internment camps was one of Mao's hallmark inventions in Yan'an, a practice that later proliferated in the PRC and has persisted to this day.
The most violent—and also the hitherto poorly understood—stage of the Rectification was the “emergency rescue” campaign, which was halted only when Georgi Dimitrov, the former Comintern leader, intervened in December 1943. To be “rescued,” all “problematic individuals” had to reveal everything and show repentance to the Party. In the end, the New Man was born—an individualist or petit bourgeois element (“half-hearted”) had been transformed into a proletarian revolutionary soldier (“whole-hearted”) and “the Party's (i.e., Mao's) docile instruments” (pp. 353, 467). With civil war looming, rescued cadres were welcomed back into the ranks to conquer China—except for Wang Shiwei and 100-plus other prisoners who were secretly executed on the banks of the Yellow River in 1947 (p. 656).
While Mao used personal history as a weapon to cow all Party members, he seized Party history as a cudgel to attack his rivals, eventually bringing them to heel by the end of the Rectification. Inspired by the genius of Stalin in writing the heavily doctored History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course, Mao devoted considerable energy to rewriting CCP history as “a life-and-death struggle between the correct lines and the erroneous lines,” with himself as the infallible manifestation of the correct lines (p. 201). In the perpetual struggle against an endless succession of external enemies and internal traitors, all his peers had committed mistakes left and right, being “Left deviating adventurists” (Li Lisan), “Right deviating opportunists,” “empiricists” (Zhou Enlai), “dogmatists” (Wang Ming), and so on. Having failed in his earlier attempts to force his colleagues to admit mistakes and accept his revisionist history, Mao finally succeeded through the Rectification. From 1940 on, he recalled nearly all top-ranking generals and cadres from various base areas to Yan'an, where they spent months, even years, undergoing rectification until they all capitulated willingly or unwillingly, thus giving Mao the “pigtails” he could grip at will (p. 201). After a marathon Seventh Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee that lasted eleven months, Mao's version of the Short Course, the “Resolution on Party History,” was passed on April 20, 1945, when Wang Ming, who had been Mao's archrival, finally and completely surrendered by denouncing his own mistakes. Mao immediately convened the long-delayed Seventh Party Congress, where he was finally elevated “to the status of a god” with “unchecked and absolute power over the entire Party” (pp. 697, 705).
The most common criticism of Gao's book, as Esherick observes, is that “the single-minded focus on Mao's struggle with his rivals in the party does not do justice to the full range of debates within the party leadership,” such as the troubled United Front with the Nationalists, the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, and relations with the Soviet Union and the United States (p. xi). An examination of the amount of time Mao and other top leaders devoted to intra-Party struggle provides clues to Gao's choice. In the eight-year War of Resistance (1937–45), while Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces bore the brunt of the Japanese onslaught and fought scores of major battles, the Communist forces launched only one major offensive, the Hundred Regiments Offensive in 1940. Safely ensconced in Yan'an, Mao did not venture out to the front lines even once. Other events were mere sideshows to him. With the Soviet Union mired in the war against Nazi Germany since 1941 and the Comintern dissolved in 1943, Mao handled the Russians with increasing ease. Stringing along the naïve American foreign service officers and the Dixie Mission was child's play compared to the life or death—or more literally “you die, I live”—intra-Party struggle. Gao rightly focuses on Mao's most central and consequential activities from 1942 to 1945.
Gao himself candidly acknowledged in the postscript (p. 715) his deep regret that he had not been able to access archives or conduct oral history interviews with Yan'an survivors, a deficiency noted by his critics. As any serious student of CCP history knows, details of the Rectification and opium production in Yan'an are among the most tightly guarded secrets of the CCP. All relevant documents remain locked in the CCP Central Archives, accessible to only a handful of senior Party historians whose duty it is to uphold Party mythology. Although some of them have claimed to have seen more complete records than Gao did, they have not made any specific challenges. Gao's book presents a dilemma to Party historians because it uses CCP sources to subvert CCP orthodoxies. Gao acquired all his sources through public means, including memoirs and document collections, especially those published by the People's Liberation Army and local archives in the relatively liberal 1980s. Using his extraordinary intuition and historian's craft, Gao has constructed the most compelling narrative of Yan'an, one that will remain so until the day when the CCP opens up its Central Archives.
Even if Gao had interviewed any Yan'anites, the ultimate survivors who had gone through the Rectification and numerous subsequent political campaigns, it is doubtful that any insights they might have offered would change his overarching narrative. As Gao notes, the history of the rescue campaign—the most crucial part of the Rectification—”was thoroughly buried, and anyone who experienced it knew enough to keep his lips sealed” (p. 659). Yan'anites interviewed by two American historians in the 1980s “looked back less in anger or repentance than nostalgia or, better, fondness for the worthier possibilities Yan'an offered.”Footnote 2 After 1949, the Yan'an cadres, who became the new ruling elite, replicated Yan'an's institutions throughout the country and subjected hundreds of millions to the ruthless, relentless thought and social control regime first developed in Yan'an. Having risen to the top of the hierarchical system, which some of them had once criticized in Yan'an, they apparently had neither seen any irony nor showed any remorse in writing—a phenomenon that, in itself, is a testament to one of the enduring consequences of the Rectification: the “dual personalities” of CCP members (p. 468) and the body politic.
How the Red Sun Rose renders obsolete much of the earlier scholarship on Yan'an and Mao. Works focusing on Mao's thought or discourse without taking into account his craft now appear to rest on shaky footing. Contemporary observers, such as Edgar Snow, and scholars who accepted Mao's two-line struggle narrative were sold a bill of goods. Gao explains, “Mao's two-faced character prevented outsiders from understanding his true nature” (p. xviii). Depending on the setting and audience, Mao switched with ease between his external persona as a cordial, enlightened leader who cared about the “little man” and his true self, the arrogant, headstrong, and vindictive bully that was known to his colleagues.
The image of the “Yan'an Round Table” that Roderick MacFarquhar repeatedly invokes in his famed trilogy The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, though appealing, is no longer tenable.Footnote 3 The Round Table never existed in Yan'an. Echoing MacFarquhar's mistake of tracing the origins of the Cultural Revolution back to the 1950s, today's China watchers in both the West and China often trace the origins of certain current phenomena to the Cultural Revolution. When they speak of “the return of the Cultural Revolution,” they, in fact, are referring to the Maoist institutions and methods perfected in Yan'an and practiced throughout the PRC. The Cultural Revolution was the culmination of Mao's permanent revolution and continuous purification projects when they reached an unsustainable climax, as the regime had run out of new enemies to purge and new incentives to distribute. A spectacular, disastrous outcome of the Maoist model, the Cultural Revolution itself does not offer much explanatory or predictive power. The Yan'an Rectification does.
Maoist institutions and methods have outlived Mao. Temporarily downplayed and partially discredited in the reform era, they have made a comeback with a vengeance in the new century. Many dormant institutions and practices have been revitalized and augmented with technology, partly thanks to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The specter of a techno-totalitarian dystopia that is haunting China has its roots in Yan'an. To understand twentieth- and twenty-first-century China and the challenge it poses to the world, Gao Hua's How the Red Sun Rose is essential reading.
