Before the 30th anniversary of the Party’s establishment, the Party Center issued
the first nationwide call to study the Party’s history. The People’s Daily said, “Party history is like a textbook about how to apply Marxism-Leninism to China’s revolutionary practice, as well as a gateway to understanding Mao Zedong Thought. Consequently, every Party member and every person who intends to understand
Communism will have to learn the Chinese Communist Party’s history.”1 The
teaching materials for this national movement was a series of articles published in the People’s Daily and the four volumes of Selected Works of Mao Zedong, which were published successively beginning in October 1951. Compared to the “Resolution” issued in 1945, these new materials did not differ remarkably in terms of the methods used to interpret historical problems and make specific assessments. What is noteworthy is that Mao’s works and Party writers’ articles integrated the hitherto scattered assessments and interpretations of Party history successfully into a logical and coherent framework. As the new materials spread rapidly and widely, official Party History in the 1950s was no longer merely a powerful weapon in the CCP’s intra-Party struggles, but had become an ideological instrument for social education.
This official framework consisted of two parts: an outline that defined whether a specific event should be included in the official History, and one that provided a series of authoritative interpretations of certain historical events. In the first half of the 1950s, the Party created the outline through articles written by Party writers and perfected related narratives by revising Mao’s works. The following two subsections will deal with these two parts of the Party’s official framework for its history.
3.1.1 “The CCP’s Thirty Years” and the Two Grand Themes of Party History Among the articles published by Party writers’ in the early 1950s, Hu Qiaomu’s 胡喬木 (1912-1992)2 “The Chinese Communist Party’s Thirty Years” (中國共產黨
1 “Jinian dang de sanshi zhounian yinggai xuexi Dang de lishi 紀念黨的三十周年應當學習黨的歷史” (To Celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Party we should learn the history of the Party), Renmin
ribao 人民日報, on June 29, 1951. Cited in Wu Zhijun 吳志軍, “Yijiu wuyi nian: jiandang sanshi zhounian ‘wenben jinian’ huodong de lishi huigu yu fansi–yi dui zhonggong dangshi de xuanchuan wei xushu zhongxin 一九五一年：建黨三十週年「文本紀念」活動的歷史回顧與反思——以對中共 黨史的宣傳為敘述中心” (The year of 1951: review and reflection on ‘text commemoration’ activities in memory of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Party—take propaganda on the CCP’s history as the narrative center), Dangshi yanjiu yu jiaoxue 黨史研究與教學, 2008(3), pp. 49-57.
2 Hu Qiaomu enrolled in the History Department at the Tsinhua University in 1930 but left the university and became a professional revolutionary a year later. He joined the CCP in 1932 and went to Yan’an in late 1936. From 1941 to 1948, Hu worked as Mao Zedong’s secretary. During this period, Hu was in charge of compiling and writing of a number of documents that were important in the history of the Party and its historiography. Ye Yonglie 葉 永 烈, Hu Qiaomu 胡 喬 木
(Biography of Hu Qiaomu). Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe 中共中央黨校出版 社, 1994. Cao Junjie 曹俊傑, Zhongguo er Qiao: Hu Qiaomu, Qiao Guanhua zhuanlue 中國二喬—— 胡喬木、喬冠華傳略 (Biography of Hu Qiaomu and Qiao Guanhua). Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe 江蘇人民出版社, 1996.
的三十年, hereafter, “Thirty Years”)3 made the most remarkable contribution in
creating the framework for official Party History.4 To write this article, Hu placed
Mao Zedong Thought at the center of Party History, borrowing Mao’s narratives directly to interpret historical issues.5 Most importantly, Hu succeeded in
arranging Mao’s assessments of Party history, which Mao had addressed on separate occasions, into a simple and clear outline.6 This was one of the reasons
that Mao praised it highly.
Generally, this outline for official Party History as created in “Thirty Years” determined the structure and themes of historical narratives, and provided history writers with an official criterion. By assessing an historical event according to this criterion, writers could recognize whether an event should be included in History books, and how they should present it.
Specifically, the official Party History outline divided the history from 1921 to 1949 into four phrases—the establishment of the Party and the First Revolutionary Civil War (1921-1927), the Second Revolutionary Civil War (1927-1937), the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the Third Revolutionary Civil War (1945-1949)7—and events in Party history were selected deliberately to
3 This article originally was a draft for Liu Shaoqi’s 劉少奇 (1898-1969) speech at the memorial meeting before Mao Zedong decided to publish it in the People’s Daily. Hu Qiaomu, “Zhongguo gongchandang de sanshi nian 中國共產黨的三十年” (The Chinese Communist Party’s thirty years).
Renmin ribao 人民日報, June 22, 1951.
4 Two articles by Chen Boda 陳伯達 also exerted influence to the writing of Party history in the 1950s. Chen was one of leading Party historians in the Yan’an period and also worked as Mao Zedong’s secretary. He wrote two articles “Du ‘Hunan nongmin yundong kaocha baogao’” (讀《湖南 農民運動考察報告》, Report on an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan) and “Neizhan shiqi de fan geming he geming” (內 戰 時 期 的 反 革 命 和 革 命, Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in the Civil War) in 1944. Compared to these two articles, Hu Qiaomu’s “Thirty years” was more influential in the 1950s, so this section uses Hu’s article as the main example.
5 In this 30,000 word article Hu cited Mao’s 18 works 24 times in total. This writing method later became a standard way to write Party History. For more about the influence of this writing method, see Xu Chong 許衝, “Lun liangongbu dangshi dui Zhonggong dangshi bianzhuan de yingxiang 論聯 共布黨史對中共黨史編撰的影響” (On the influence of A Concise History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [Bolsheviks] on the CCP’s historiography), Xiandai zhexue 現代哲學, 2013(2), pp. 47-56.
6 Chinese specialists of CCP historiography have already noticed this point. Zhang Jingru 張靜如 said, “this article did not contain a large amount of material, but mainly drew an outline and built a framework of the Party’s history of the previous thirty years, while also bringing out some basic views. All these played an important role in studying the CCP’s history at the time and in the following years.” See “Bianxie ‘Zhongguo gongchandang lishi jiaocai’ shiling 編寫‘中國共產黨歷史 教材’拾零” (Some issues about the compilation of Textbook of the History of the CCP), Bainian chao 百年潮, 2013(2), pp. 76-78.
7 Dividing the Party’s history in such a way has exerted considerable influence on Party history studies ever since. In August 1951 the official journal of the CCP’s Propaganda Department Xuexi 學習 called on history researchers to follow this way to divide and name stages of the Party’s past.
demonstrate two grand themes. The first of these was that, when narrating intra-Party power struggles, the narratives addressed conflicts between the correct and incorrect lines, in which Mao was the representative of the correct line. In order to propagandize the CCP’s legitimacy to the outside world, the second of these themes made the CCP’s contribution the focus of issues external to the Party. During the Yan’an period, the Party used this same technique of parsing out its history according to internal line struggles.8 In the 1950s, official materials
presented five incorrect lines that “brought great loss to the Party,” each of which had corresponding standard and inflexible narratives. They are the right-leaning error of Chen Duxiu (Chen Duxiu youqing cuowu 陳 獨 秀 右 傾 錯 誤),9 the
“left”-leaning putschism (zuoqing mangdong zhuyi 「左」傾盲動主義) represented by Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 (1899-1935),10 the “left”-leaning adventurism (zuoqing
maoxian zhuyi 「左」傾冒險主義) represented by Li Lisan, 李立三 (1899-1967),11
the “left”-leaning adventurism represented by Wang Ming,12 and the right-leaning
separatism of Zhang Guotao. These five incorrect lines exemplified the core of the Party’s first twenty years of history, throughout which Mao proved repeatedly to have made and conducted the correct line.
The contribution that the CCP made to China and to the Chinese people is also an essential theme in the CCP’s official History framework. The framework showed
See Wu Zhijun, 2008.
8 In his speech in the Party Center Study Group (中共中央學習組) in 1942, Mao Zedong considered lines and policies as the main object of Party history study. See Mao Zedong, “Ruhe yanjiu Zhonggong dangshi 如何研究中共黨史” (How to do research on the Chinese Communist Party’s history), in Mao Zedong wenji 毛澤東文集 (Collection of Mao Zedong’s works), Volume 2. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe 人民出版社, 1993, p. 406. One year later, Liu Shaoqi divided lines within the Party into “the Bolshevik line represented by Mao Zedong” and “the Menshevic lines represented by opportunists within the Party”. See Liu Shaoqi, “Qingsuan dangnei de mengshiweike zhuyi sixiang
清算黨內的孟什維克主義思想” (Eliminate Menshevik thought within the Party), in Laoyidai gemingjia lun dangshi yu dangshi yanjiu 老一代革命家論黨史與黨史研究 (The revolutionaries of senior generation’s talks about the history of the Party and research on Party History). Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe 山西人民出版社, 1993, pp. 15-16.
9 According to the CCP’s official interpretation, the right deviation error of Chen Duxiu (1879-1942) manifested as pinning all of their hope on left-wing Nationalists, which led to the failure of the Great Revolution.
10 According to the CCP’s official interpretation, the “left”-leaning putschism manifested as proposing not only to struggle against imperialism and feudalism, but also to struggle against national bourgeoisie and upper class petty bourgeoisie.
11 Around 1930, Li Lisan and other leaders of the CCP believed it was time to build a national revolutionary regime by armed uprisings. The CCP’s official historiography criticized that their activities had brought serious loss to the Party and to the Communists’ revolutionary career. 12 According to the CCP’s official interpretation, Wang Ming’s “left”-deviation error was more serious than that of Li Lisan, as Wang’s mistakes directly caused the failure of the Central Soviet Region’s fifth encirclement campaign and forced the Central Red Army to start the Long March.
consistently that the CCP as a whole engaged in causes that benefited the Chinese people. Specifically, when the revolution led by the bourgeoisie, whose purpose was to establish a bourgeois republic, failed, the Chinese Communist Party, as the vanguard of the most advanced class—the working class—emerged, as was necessitated by the times (yingyun ersheng 應運而生). When imperialist powers and the Northern Warlords persecuted the Chinese people, the CCP cooperated with the Nationalist Party, paving the way for a new historical phase: anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism, and anti-warlordism. When Chiang Kai-shek became a new warlord, the CCP began to fight him and his army. Finally, when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the CCP opposed their aggression resolutely. To summarize, Party History was trying its best to promote the following claim: only the CCP can save China.
Before the Communists assumed national power, their internal and external propaganda systems focused on different content, with the two grand themes above as their main concerns. The content concerning “line struggles” existed only in Party resolutions and internal documents. Senior cadres received these materials, while they carefully kept them secret from the outside world. At the same time, the CCP’s propaganda system spared no effort to demonstrate its merits to the Chinese people. In some cases, careful planning began immediately after particular events occurred.13 In other cases, it was other media, rather than
the Party’s propaganda system, that played a major role in promoting the CCP’s contributions, and in turn, the Party’s sophisticated theorists and writers made
13 Propaganda on the Long March is a typical example. As has been mentioned in the Introduction section, right after the Long March, the Chairman of the Central Military Committee Mao Zedong and the Chief of Political Department Yang Shangkun 楊尚昆 (1907-1998) issued a notice to all commanders and soldiers who took part in the Long March, asking them to recall their experience and to write down their feelings for the purpose of “propaganda”. The notice said, “Writing articles amounts to making a donation to the Red Army and improving the international influence of the Red Army.” See Shen Jin沈津, “Preface”, in Hongjun Changzheng ji 紅軍長征記 (The Red Army’s Long March). Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe 廣西師範大學出版社, 2006, p. 2. Tong Xiaopeng 童小鵬 wrote in his diary on August 6, 1936: “[We were told that the compilation of our articles] would be brought out of the Red region by that foreigner and be published, in order to solicit donations for purchasing aircraft. This news makes us extremely happy.” Cited in Liu Tong
劉統, Qinli Changzheng: laizi Hongjun Changzheng zhe de yuanshi jilu 親歷長征——來自紅軍長征 者 的 原 始 記 錄 (Personal experience during the Long March: primary recordings by the participants of the Long March). Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe 中央文獻出版社, 2006, p. 1. The “foreigner” referred to was the American journalist Edgar Snow who entered the Northern Shaanxi region in July 1936 through arrangements made by the CCP’s underground organizations. The elaborate arrangement of propaganda work is evident.
good use of their lavish praise.14
Both the CCP’s intra-Party and external-Party propaganda systems were unquestionably efficient. Before 1949, Mao’s portrayal within the Party as the designer and consistent practitioner of the correct line had been achieved successfully, while a positive image of the CCP as a patriotic and efficient organization had been disseminated widely in China and even around the world. The official Party History framework built in the 1950s incorporated the above two aspects of Party propaganda.
Thus, the question is how the WRA was presented in this Party History outline, and how this position influenced the writing of the WRA’s history. First, due to its relationship with the so-called “Zhang Guotao Line,” the WRA was included in the outline. This is important, because it meant the WRA would continue to be part of the Party history narrative. In contrast, the outline excluded many events and figures completely, and as a result, they were never mentioned in the Mao Era. Second, as an historical event, the WRA fell in the category of “line struggles,” as evidence of Zhang Guotao’s errors, and as a result, was deemed unworthy of research, and instead, deserved only criticism. When E. H. Carr explained the difference between a “fact” and an “historical fact,” he emphasized the function of interpretation: “Whether a fact can be a well-established historical fact depends on whether the interpretation in support of which historians cite this incident is accepted by other historians as valid and significant. Its status as a historical fact will turn on a question of interpretation.”15 It is thus fair to say that the
relationship with Zhang made the history of the WRA an “historical fact” in Party History.
This outline, however, only included the WRA in the official Party history framework, but did not provide Party writers with any content with which to narrate this issue. Mao’s works would fulfill this task.
14 For instance, the so-called “Great Victory at the Pingxing Pass” (Pingxingguan dajie 平型關大
捷)—in which the Eighth Route Army secured a minor victory over Japanese forces in 1937—was greatly exaggerated by the media in Nationalist-controlled regions and subsequently was taken advantage of by the CCP to raise its reputation. For more details about the Victory at the Pingxing Pass and its propaganda, see Zhai Zhicheng 翟志成, “Jiti jiyi yu lishi zhenshi: ‘Pingxingguan dajie’ de jiangou yu jiegou 集體記憶與歷史真實：「平型關大捷」的建構與解構” (Collective memory vs. historical truth: the construction of the so-called ‘Great Victory at the Pingxing Pass’ and its later deconstruction), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan 中央研究院近代史研究所集刊, No. 51, 2006(3), pp. 131-186.
3.1.2 The WRA in Selected Works of Mao Zedong
Before the Reform Era, the only authoritative interpretation of the WRA was an endnote in one of Mao’s most famous articles. As will be described in Part Two of this thesis, even after the 1980s, opponents of the “new interpretation” of the WRA still cited this endnote frequently in their arguments. It is ridiculous to rely merely on an endnote of some hundred words to explain a historical issue as complicated as the WRA. This absurd phenomenon, however, was common in Party historiography. As Yang Kuisong, a Chinese specialist in Party history, has pointed out, the four volumes of Selected Works of Mao Zedong (hereafter, Selected Works) included standard interpretations of almost all important issues in Party history before 1949, and consequently, for quite a long time, not only Party history teachers, but also researchers in relevant fields, considered reading and memorizing the contents of Selected Works to be their basic and most reliable training.16 In this regard, a brief discussion of how Selected Works was compiled
will advance our understanding of Party historiography in the Mao Era greatly.
From the beginning, both the Party Center and Mao himself emphasized the value of Mao’s works as materials for studying Party history.17 In order to make
Mao’s works the most authoritative materials, and to indoctrinate the masses with the leader’s most recent understanding of the Party’s past, Mao and his secretaries, together with Party theorists and historians, made a number of changes to these works.18 Mao himself invested considerable efforts in this task, and he checked
and approved all writings before their publication.19
16 Yang Kuisong 楊奎松, “Wushi nian lai de zhonggong dangshi yanjiu 五十年來的中共黨史研究” (Party historiography in the past fifty years), Jindaishi yanjiu 近代史研究, 1999(5), pp. 178-202. 17 On July 1, 1951, the People’s Daily announced the publication of Selected Works in advance, stressing the importance of learning Party history and pointing out that “the basic materials for learning should be Comrade Mao Zedong’s major works that he wrote in the different phrases of Chinese revolution.” “Mao Zedong xuanji chuban weiyuanhui tongzhi 毛澤東選集出版委員會通知” (A notice issued by the Committee for the Publication of Selected Works of Mao Zedong), Renmin ribao 人民日報, on July 1, 1951. Cited in Wu Zhijun, 2008.
18 One of mao’s secretary, Tian Jiaying 田家英 (1922-1966), was in charge of compiling Mao’s works. Tian went to Yan’an in 1937 when he was only 15 years old. After taking courses in Shaanbei Public School (Shaanbei gongxue 陝北公學), he joined the CCP and became a teacher in that school. From 1948 Tian was Mao’s secretary until he committed suicide in 1966. The historians and theorists who took part in the compiling work included senior Marxists such as Ai Siqi 艾思奇
(1910-1966), who had become a famous theorist as early as in the early Yan’an period. See Pang Xianzhi 逄先知, “Mao Zedong he ta de mishu Tian Jiaying 毛澤東和他的秘書田家英” (Mao Zedong and his secretary Tian Jiaying), in Dong Bian 董邊, Tan Deshan 鐔德山 and Zeng Zi 曾自, eds.,
Mao Zedong he tade mishu Tian Jiaying 毛澤東和他的秘書田家英 (Mao Zedong and his secretary Tian Jiaying). Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe 中央文獻出版社, 1996, p. 39.