Quick questions on Mao at Yan'an: HSC Modern History Personality

After the Long March the CCP first occupied Bao'an in northern Shaanxi. In December 1936 Zhang Xueliang detained Chiang Kai-shek at Xi'an (the Xi'an Incident) and forced a Second United Front for war with Japan. With KMT pressure relaxed, the CCP moved its capital to Yan'an in January 1937. Yan'an was a poor town of cave dwellings (yaodong) in a loess plateau, militarily defensible and economically marginal.

The Marco Polo Bridge incident of 7 July 1937 began full-scale war. The Second United Front (formally signed September 1937) reorganised CCP forces as the Eighth Route Army (under Zhu De) and the New Fourth Army (under Ye Ting). The KMT bore the brunt of conventional warfare; the CCP fought a guerrilla war in the Japanese rear, building base areas (kang Ri genjudi) behind enemy lines in north and central China.

The Yan'an Way (Yan'an daolu) is the historians' term for the CCP's wartime model. Its features were:

At the Sixth Plenum in October 1938 Mao called for the "Sinification of Marxism" (Makesizhuyi de Zhongguohua), the adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to Chinese conditions. The doctrinal texts of the Yan'an period are:

The Zhengfeng yundong (rectification of work style) launched in February 1942 was Mao's instrument to discipline the CCP. The targets were "subjectivism", "sectarianism", and "stereotyped Party writing" (Party-bagu), code for Wang Ming's Moscow-trained faction and for liberal May Fourth intellectuals.

The Seventh Congress of the CCP met at Yan'an from 23 April to 11 June 1945. It elected Mao Chairman of the Central Committee, Chairman of the Politburo, and Chairman of the Secretariat. The new Party Constitution enshrined Mao Zedong Thought (Mao Zedong sixiang) as the guiding ideology, the first time the doctrine of a living leader had been written into a communist party constitution. Liu Shaoqi's report On the Party formally constructed the Mao cult.

The Party grew from about 40,000 members in 1937 to about 1.2 million by 1945. The Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army together grew from about 92,000 to about 900,000 regulars with a militia of about 2.2 million by 1945. The base areas grew to about 95 million people.

Mark Selden (The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, 1971) gave the influential New Left account of the Yan'an Way as a participatory mass-mobilisation model.

The Yan'an Way had a real participatory side and a coercive side. Wang Shiwei's fate and the Rescue Campaign are essential.

The CCP grew during the Sino-Japanese War (1937 to 1945). The Civil War followed.

The Seventh Congress enshrining of Mao Zedong Thought is the technical fact of the elevation.