1 The two classic works which best represent the different sides of this debate are Johnson, Chalmers, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar and Selden, Mark, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar Selden, in his later work, has modified his previous views to incorporate the more coercive aspects of the CCP's pre-1949 revolutionary legacy into his views on the Party's I populist, mobilizing strategy. See Selden, Mark, “Cooperation and conflict: cooperative and collective formations in China's countryside,” in The Political Economy of Chinese Socialism (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), pp. 62–108.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Huang, Philip C. C., The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar and The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

3 See Hartford, Kathleen, Step by Step: Reform, Resistance and Revolution in Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region 1937–1945, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1980Google Scholar, and Kathleen, Hartford and Goldstein, Steven M. (eds.), Single Sparks. China's Rural Revolutions (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989).Google Scholar

4 The impressive list includes Deng Xiaoping, Bo Yibo, Liu Huaqing, Song Renqiong, Wan Li and Zhao Ziyang. As Goodman points out 17 of the 87 individuals who sat in the Politburo from 1949 to 1989 served in the JinJiYuLu as compared to 16 who were in or under units based in Yan'an at that time.

5 Gregor Benton has done an excellent job of culling the documents and memoirs which have appeared in recent years on the New Fourth Army to write a compelling account of what enabled these men and women to endure unbelievable hardships and remain committed to the Communist cause. See Mountain Fires. The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934–38 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

6 Under the “three-thirds” system of government the local elite was guaranteed one-third of governmental positions. However, indirect elections to higher level administrative organs ensured that Communists, who were also to occupy one-third of the positions, dominated real decision-making.

7 Hartford, Step by Step.

8 Zhen, Peng, Guanyu Jin-Cha-Ji bianqu gongzuo he juti zhengce baogao (Report on the Work of the Party and Specific Policies in the Jin-Cha-Ji Border Region) (Beijing: Zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1981).Google Scholar Extracts are translated in Tony Saich, The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis, 1920–1949 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, forthcoming).

9 Dorris, Carl, “Peasant mobilization in North China and the origins of Yenan Communism,” The China Quarterly, No. 68 (December 1976), pp. 697–700.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 One of the reasons why Chen Kaige's film Yellow Earth was attacked by orthodox Party ideologues was precisely because there was no class struggle in the village and no “wicked” landlord exploiting the peasantry. The struggle was against nature and for physical survival and not a class struggle to realize a Communist future.

11 For the earlier work of Keating, Pauline see Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and Cooperativisation in North Shaanxi, 1934–1945, Ph.D. dissertation, Australian National University, 1989.Google Scholar

12 See, for example, Bianco, Lucien, “Peasants and revolution,” Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1975), p. 315.Google Scholar

13 This point is made even more strongly in her article “The ecological origins of the Yan'an Way,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 32 (July 1994), pp. 123–153.

14 For earlier criticism of this kind of thinking see Yung-Fa, Chen, Yan'an de yinxiang (Yan'an Shadows) (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiu jindaishi yanjiusuo, 1990).Google Scholar For an account that critically engages the notion of the Yan'an Way while demonstrating how Yan'an was transformed from a military base to the moral centre of the revolution, see Apter, David E. and Saich, Tony, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).Google Scholar For Selden's own recent thinking see “Cooperation and conflict,” and the relevant sections of Friedman, Edward, Pickowicz, Paul and Selden, Mark, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

15 Yung-Fa, Chen, Making Revolution: The Chinese Communist Movement in East and Central China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).Google Scholar

16 In a recent essay, Stephen Averill has adopted an ecological approach to the study of the Futian Incident of 1931. His analysis of local society shows how interwoven CCP and Kuomintang organizations were at the local level and how the interplay of local conditions and higher level commands created a situation of mutual distrust on the ground resulting in one of the CCP's most violent purges. Local CCP members in this account are not abstract or amorphous entities but real flesh and blood figures; the name of Mao Zedong barely appears in the account. Averill, Stephen C., “The origins of the Futian Incident,” in Tony, Saich and Hans, Van De Ven (eds.), New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).Google Scholar

17 A preliminary attempt is made in Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic and Tony Saich, “Writing or re-writing history: the construction of a Maoist Party history,” in Saich and van de Ven (eds.), New Perspectives.