ACCIDENTAL HOLY LAND: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China. By Joseph W. Esherick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. xxvvii, 314 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illustrations). US$35.00 paper; free ebook. ISBN 9780520385320.
“Yan’an is China’s ‘revolutionary holy land’” (xi), Joseph Esherick writes in the preface to his landmark new book, “it was the crucible that made the Chinese Communist Party what it is today” (xi). Yet Accidental Holy Land is not a history of the Yan’an era (ca. 1937–1947). It is instead the story of the “conflicting actors, in constantly changing circumstances, involving a series of contingent events” (xii) that made the Yan’an era not inevitable but possible. Esherick has written the first major study to explore the Communist movement in northern Shaanxi Province (Shaanbei) prior to the 1935 arrival of Mao Zedong and much of the future leadership of the People’s Republic of China. He then describes how these Long March veterans wrested leadership away from local Communist operatives and secured what would become the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region.
Accidental Holy Land begins with a “longue durée examination of the local history and geography of Shaanbei” (197) and proceeds more or less chronologically through 1940 when the border region took its final shape. As the title suggests, among Esherick’s objectives is challenging “determinist views of history” by demonstrating that at multiple points the survival of the Shaanbei base was what he terms an “accident of history” without which China’s revolutionary movement, and therefore its post-revolutionary present, would look quite different. Importantly, “‘accidental’ does not mean random or lacking knowable causes” (208). One of Accidental Holy Land’s great strengths is to show how many of those explanations are embedded within the unique ecology and human geography of Shaanbei—a dry, loess-covered region which even by the standards of northwest China “was renowned for its poverty” (9)—and even to what turns out to be critical variations within northern Shaanxi. These helped produce “two endlessly competing branches of the party” (202). In its desperately poor and thinly populated western reaches, “the hero of the Shaanbei revolution” (58) Liu Zhidan would emerge to lead guerilla forces made up largely of bandits, militiamen, and secret society members. In its northeast, CCP cells instead developed around more ideologically informed schoolteachers before turning into village-based organizations often dominated by single families. One “had an army but no party organization,” the other “a rural organization but no army” (97).
Early chapters follow the revolutionary struggle in Shaanbei from its birth during the May Fourth period through its growth during the First United Front (1924–1927) when “the Nationalist Party apparatus in Shaanxi was largely built by Communists” (41). Chiang Kaishek’s anti-CCP purge in 1927 hollowed out the “Beijing-trained intellectuals” (198) in charge of the provincial committee, momentarily giving Shaanbei revolutionaries freer rein to pursue policies tailored to their localities’ distinct conditions. In particular, local Communists understood that land reform had little appeal in Shaanbei, where land was plentiful but taxes and debt were often ruinous. When more dogmatically orthodox, Soviet-trained “Bolsheviks” took control of the central party, the rural focus and muddied class base of the Shaanbei branch came under attack, culminating in a rectification campaign that targeted the local leadership as “right opportunists” and disastrous military campaigns that depleted local forces. Esherick shows that a 1933 raid of the provincial committee in Xi’an “liberated the guerillas from impractical party direction” (199). Finally managing to unite the two wings of the local party, Liu Zhidan was able to score a series of impressive military victories and secure the base area just in time for remnants of the Long March to find refuge in Shaanbei.
A core theme throughout Accidental Holy Land is competition between local and extralocal Communist leaders. Despite Esherick’s clear sympathy for the former, the arrival of Mao and other senior party officials signalled the eclipse of the native Shaanbei revolutionaries. The last two chapters provide a detailed examination of the tortured processes by which the Second United Front between the CCP and the Nationalists (Kuomintang) was forced upon all parties. While the 1936 Xi’an Incident is perhaps the most well-known “accident” of the Chinese Revolution, Esherick reminds us that Shaanbei was never intended to be the final stop on the Long March and that “Mao and the Communist leadership had no desire to stay in this poor, barren, and sparsely populated corner of China” (162). The CCP may indeed have been “saved by Xi’an.” Esherick argues that it also removed the CCP’s two most powerful allies (Nationalist generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng), leading to their further isolation and “[leaving] Mao and the Communist Party reluctant occupants of the Yan’an caves” (162). Despite other misgivings, Esherick shows that the choice of Yan’an for the Party’s new headquarters was not in of itself “accidental.” The “small frontier town” had not previously been the site of CCP activity or of KMT strength; “to a large degree it was a blank slate on which the Party could draft the contours of its new state” (184).
Many of the methodological approaches and theoretical concerns found in Accidental Holy Land were first teased by the author in his influential 1995 article, “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution.” Described at the time as an “autocritique of my own past thinking and writing on modern China,” Esherick wrote, “As a whole, I am striving for a reassessment of the revolution that acknowledges both the failings and the contingency of the revolution without reverting to the shibboleths of anti-Communist scholarship.”[1] Accidental Holy Land meets this task head on through the judiciousness and precision with which its author interrogates his sources to expose the specificities, idiosyncrasies, contradictions, and disagreements buried within the opaque language and routinized formulations found in CCP reports and missives, all without losing sight of the structural constraints and larger historical processes that impacted the revolutionary movement in Shaanbei. The bulk of the primary material is drawn from document collections that were originally published for internal party use. While Esherick admits that his initial intention to construct an “anthropology of the party” (xvii) was stymied by his inability to access crucial archives, Accidental Holy Land is validation that in the right hands these types of state-published collections, despite having undergone unclear processes of editorial curation, can be used to fashion empirically rich and highly original reassessments of the past that undermine both grand narratives and unduly deterministic conclusions.
Still, while the various “accidents” Esherick points to are clearly pivotal inflection points, the notion itself that the outcome of the Chinese Revolution owes much to “historical exigency” (201) is somewhat less compelling than several of the author’s other interventions. After all—hobbyists, ideologs, and partisans aside—it is unclear which scholars still cling to overtly determinist views of China’s recent past. Inspired directly or indirectly by Esherick’s 1995 clarion call, much of the best writing on the Chinese Revolution now takes historical exigency as a given. In this light and given the wealth of evidence Esherick marshals to demonstrate the folly of excessive faith in historical determinism, I find myself wondering what insights might have emerged from a more robust engagement with scholarship on critical junctures and historical contingency. It might also help blunt the occasional impression that the author is arguing with ghosts.[2]
In his conclusion, Esherick usefully highlights a number of “themes,” several of which have been raised in other contexts, that shed light on “the larger process of the Chinese Revolution” (202) both before and after 1949. These include the critical importance of local actors in “building a revolutionary foundation” who are then “sidelined after a Communist regime is established” (203). As Esherick notes, this pattern can be detected elsewhere, including in the Jiangxi Soviet and later after the CCP captured Hainan Island. A link might also be drawn to other traditionally non-Han areas including Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, albeit with an added ethnopolitical element. Relatedly Esherick points to the “role of violence in the revolutionary process,” not just against the enemy but also as a tool of recruitment and then as an instrument to impose party discipline. However, he suggests that rectification in Shaanbei was “qualitatively different than the mass executions of the Futian Incident of 1930” (204) and, with notable exceptions, reflects a trend toward the more targeted exercise of disciplinary violence. Esherick also offers a number of important correctives to stubbornly held beliefs about China’s Communist movement. For example, while showing that Mao was not alone in his early advocacy for rural revolution, Esherick demonstrates that the founding of the Shaanbei border region “was largely a military process” and “not the product of fundamental social change” (192). The establishment of Communist control was a top-down process that began with military might which then allowed for party-building and finally for socialist reforms. Not the other way around.
Across his remarkable career, Joseph Esherick has brought us field-defining books and articles that have helped shape our understanding of modern China’s social and political history. Accidental Holy Land now can be added to that list. Particularly at a time when the current leadership under Xi Jinping—whose father Xi Zhongxun was a native Shaanbei cadre often sidelined by central leaders—loudly evokes grand historical narratives to legitimize both its rule and its agenda, this authoritative account of the pre-Yan’an period should be required for any serious student of China’s socialist revolution and will appeal to a general readership interested in the serpentine route the Communist Party took to power. Importantly, Accidental Holy Land should also serve as both inspiration and evidence that restrictions placed on archives need not spell the end for groundbreaking research on China’s recent past.
Benno Weiner
Carnegie Mellon University
Joseph Esherick responds to Benno Weiner
I would like to begin by commending Pacific Affairs for this experimental format of reciprocal reviews and responses, though it has developed in ways that I had not anticipated. When I accepted the invitation to review Benno Weiner’s The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, I presumed that the editors envisioned a comparison of the revolutionary process on the Tibetan frontier to that in the desolate regions of northern Shaanxi. I soon learned, however, that Weiner’s book was not concerned with revolutionary origins (which were entirely external in his area of focus) but with the process of transforming an imperial frontier into an integral part of a multi-ethnic nation. Despite our different intellectual projects, Weiner and I did share a concern for close attention to local environments and human geography, and the challenge of doing local research in the People’s Republic of China, given limited access to archives and the perils involved in using local informants.
Because of our different historical projects, this exchange will focus not on contrasting developments in Qinghai and Shaanbei but on questions of methodology. Most of Weiner’s review of Accidental Holy Land is generous and flattering. It would be self-serving to review that appreciation. I shall focus instead on his one major criticism: my critique of determinism. As he writes, “After all—hobbyists, ideologs, and partisans aside—it is unclear which scholars still cling to overtly determinist views of China’s recent past.” My account, he writes, gives “the occasional impression that the author is arguing with ghosts.” This criticism is neither unfair nor unexpected. Indeed, Fabio Lanza and Benjamin Kindler have made similar critiques in the PRC History Review.[3] The principal defense that I would offer is that my main audience for many years has been scholars in China, where the influence of ideologs and partisans is not to be ignored. Chapters in this book were first presented in talks to audiences in China, and the Chinese version was published in Hong Kong even before the University of California Press version appeared. Nonetheless, I should confess that theoretical sophistication is not one of my strengths, and my insistence on the importance of contingency in history is not founded on any philosophical and historiographic theory but on years of practice as a social historian trying to understand why history took the path that it did.
In this regard, I would emphasize rather different conjunctures than those highlighted in Weiner’s review. The book’s title comes from chapter 5 of the book, which describes Mao’s speech to the Politburo on the Long March, arguing that the Red Army should advance to the Soviet border to recuperate and be resupplied by the Communist International. It was only a few weeks later that Mao learned, by “accidentally” reading about it in a newspaper, that there was a Communist base in northern Shaanxi and redirected the Long March to that base. Imagine what would have happened had the original plan of fleeing to the Soviet border been followed. The Chinese Revolution would look very different, and the Yan’an era of self-sufficiency, the Sinification of Marxism, and the United Front against Japan might never have occurred.
These are the sorts of contingencies that I have tried to emphasize. They are the “accidents” of history—not without cause or reason, but critical conjunctures that influenced the course of events. They are, furthermore, different from the “historical exigency” that Weiner criticizes. In the passage he cites (201), I argue that historical exigency—the failure of the Red Army’s military campaign in Shanxi and the abandonment of the plan to receive Soviet aid through Ningxia—forced the Party to remain in Shaanbei, and ultimately make Yan’an its capital. There is a degree of compulsion in the notion of exigency, of which the dictionary definition is “that which is required in a particular situation.” I completely agree with Weiner’s statement that “much of the best writing on the Chinese Revolution now takes historical exigency as a given.” My argument, however, goes a step further, arguing that the progress of history was shaped by contingencies, and some developments were the result of “accidents”—in this case, Mao’s reading of a newspaper article. Crucially, many such “accidents” involved decisions by political elites whose thinking and motives are not easily discerned from the sources now available, and may indeed never be known. But if we are to assess accurately the course and causes of the Chinese Revolution, we must give full weight to these accidental factors and not resort, as some still do, to easy generalizations of capitalist imperialism, peasant revolution, Communist organization, or Chinese nationalism. On this, I am confident that Weiner and I agree, but how we correctly assess the basis for and role of political elites’ decisions, and how we identify and assess other contingencies to reach a compelling analysis of all possible causes—psychological, personal, political, economic, cultural, social, local, national, and international—is a subject on which historians will and should continue to debate.
THE CHINESE REVOLUTION ON THE TIBETAN FRONTIER. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Columbia University. By Benno Weiner. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2020. xx, 285 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$45.00 cloth, US$30.00 ebook. ISBN 9781501749391.
China’s Tibetan frontier stretched from Yunnan in the south through Sichuan to Qinghai in the north, and this book addresses the Communist effort to incorporate the pastoral grasslands of Qinghai into their new nation. The Manchus who ruled China’s last (Qing) dynasty were content to embrace diversity and a degree of local conflict, allowing local monasteries and “chiefdoms” (to use the author Benno Weiner’s term for secular local elites) to govern the local population. The weak governments of the early republic were unable to intervene in the region, and the Kuomindang opted to let the Sino-Muslim (Hui) warlord Ma Bufang rule from the capital of Qinghai. As a result, in a process described in this informative book, the difficult transition from the “composite, multiethnic empire led by a Manchu ruling house” (10) to the unitary sovereignty of nationhood began only after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Basing his study on archival research undertaken in the mid-2000s, Weiner made an explicit decision to avoid interview sources over concern for the safety of his interlocutors. He did, however, gain extensive access to party and state records in the archives of Zeku county, which was established in the Tibetan pastoral regions of southeastern Qinghai in 1953. There was no local Communist Party in this area, and the cadres of the new state seem to have been exclusively Han Chinese from elsewhere in north China, so the tale told in this book is the early PRC history of a Han Chinese party-state seeking to transform the economy and society of an ethnically and religiously distinct population. Predictably, the process did not go smoothly, and the book ends with the bloody suppression of the Amdo Rebellion of 1958. That rebellion was part of an increasingly violent Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule, beginning with the Kham region of Sichuan in 1955–1957, and ending in the Central Tibetan disturbances of 1959 that led to the Dalai Llama’s flight to India.
The Party envisioned the Chinese frontier through the lens of a Leninist nationalities policy. In Qinghai, the diverse Han, Hui, Mongol, and Tibetan ethnicities were conceived as distinct nationalities (minzu), and the province was divided into ethnically defined “autonomous” counties and regions, though control remained with the Han Chinese party apparatus. This party apparatus was supposed to form United Front alliances with local religious and secular elites, and the inevitable tensions in this process were dealt with through successive campaigns to combat “Han chauvinism” in the Party. At first, a degree of unity was maintained around opposition to Ma Bufang, who had launched repeated campaigns against Tibetan dissidents. A 1951–1953 revolt by former officers of Ma Bufang’s army probably strengthened opposition to rule by Hui military men.
The organization of this book is basically chronological. Between the founding of Zeku county in 1953 and the Amdo Rebellion of 1958, the history of PRC rule on the Tibetan frontier seemed to follow the conventional oscillation between “high tide” leftism in 1955, moderation at the time of the Eighth Party Congress of 1956, and then progressively leftist policies leading to the Great Leap Forward. The key policy issue in Zeku was the settlement of pastoral people and the collectivization of their herds and economy, a transformation that Weiner associates with the “high modernism” of James Scott. Predictably the local population was not enthusiastic about this transformation of their established lifestyle, and the result was the Amdo Rebellion of 1958.
Weiner’s account of these early years of Communist rule adds important local texture to our understanding of the transformation of China’s frontier. The transformation of Tibetan areas of Qinghai came completely from elsewhere in China. Lacking any local party to rely on, the CCP tried to adopt United Front policies to the frontier, working through religious and secular elites. Weiner devotes considerable attention to the Party’s reliance on the United Front, and the failure of that effort deserves further consideration and comparative analysis. My impression is that in China proper, Han elites in the professions, the Democratic League, and even the Kuomindang and the military responded to United Front appeals on the basis of a shared commitment to nationalism. For these types, the United Front policy of the early PRC could be successful. But there was much less common ground between the CCP and the religious and secular elites in the Tibetan areas. The United Front may have worked for certain Mongolian elites, who had been directly threatened by the wartime Japanese invasion. But in the west, Chinese nationalism had little appeal, and a nationalism interpreted by Han Chinese cadres could be a double-edged sword. Why, locals might ask, is there no room for Tibetan, Hui, or Uyghur nationalism? How, in short, are we to understand the working of the United Front on China’s ethnic frontier?
A second question is the source of opposition to PRC rule. There is no question that the PRC’s incorporation of Tibet was a bloody process on all sides. The documentary record that Weiner cites repeatedly blames the Tibetans’ “religious superstition.” Of those who resisted Communist rule, one document stated: “Religion is at their core; [monasteries and mosques] are their headquarters” (172). Weiner seems appropriately suspicious of this explanation, focusing his account on the transformation of Zeku’s pastoral economy. But the complex and confusing uprising of 1958 did not begin in Zeku. As Weiner’s helpful map (170) shows, Zeku joined the rebellion only in its final stage, and it seems that some of the earliest revolts began in agricultural regions of southern Gansu (Gannan). These, in turn, were certainly related to the 1955–1957 unrest in the neighbouring regions of Kham. The revolt presumably had multiple causes, and religion, ethnicity (with religious affiliation an important component of ethnicity), and economic transformation all seem to have played a role.
This book by Weiner, part of a growing literature on unrest and resistance on China’s ethnic frontier, is a significant, archives-based account of the process in the Tibetan regions of Qinghai. The press’s blurb on the book has appropriately flagged “the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence” in the PRC’s incorporation of the frontier. This is undeniable and an important corrective to earlier notions of a “honeymoon” period in the early PRC. Clearly, there was no true honeymoon on the frontier, but the question remains as to the source of the violence, and we should be wary of conclusions that suggest that frontier people are somehow naturally violent. Weiner’s careful, local, archives-based inquiry into the process on the Amdo frontier is highly informative, but is unlikely to be the final word. We all hope that despite the enormous barriers to dispassionate historical and socio-political research in this area, more work will follow.
Joseph W. Esherick
Berkeley, California
Benno Weiner responds to Joseph Esherick
Studies of modern China’s frontiers often get shunted into ethnic studies or borderlands subfields. Yet the decades-long process by which non-Han subjects of the Manchu Qing Empire were transformed into minority nationalities within a Han-majority nation-state is among the core issues of modern Chinese history. So, I greatly appreciate that the editors of Pacific Affairs chose to feature The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier alongside Accidental Holy Land, a story about a different sort of “border region” with perhaps more mainstream appeal. I am equally grateful to Joseph Esherick, both for his careful review of my book and for being among the prominent scholars of China’s long twentieth century who have treated the question “How the Qing became China?” with the importance and centrality it deserves.[4] In this short response I will limit myself to a couple of topics Esherick features in his comments on my book that also are central to his study of the Shaanxi base area: the United Front and the matter of violence in the making of revolutionary China.
For some time, the role of the Second United Front in the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power has been a mainstay within both scholarly and mainstream narratives of the Chinese revolution. However, Accidental Holy Land brings a new level of clarity to the drawn-out and contingent manner through which the KMT-CCP alliance was forged. We know much less about how the United Front operated during China’s early-socialist period. As Esherick notes, when working among Han urbanites and overseas Chinese the Party appealed to feelings of patriotism and the notion of building a common future. Gary Groot likens the United Front in these contexts to a corporatist institution which granted a limited number of representatives access and privilege in exchange for compliance.[5] In Amdo, as I suggest, the United Front is better thought of as a “subimperial” practice, a term Uradyn Bulag coined to describe the modern state’s “tapping into the heritage of the former empire’s techniques of rule in the service of nationalism.”[6] Lacking other avenues by which to reach the “masses,” party leaders in Amdo welcomed almost any amenable non-Han elite into its United Front, even those who had taken up arms against the CCP. These were often the same figures and institutions that had long served as intermediaries between the imperial state and local communities, and in many cases they had even fulfilled a similar function under the KMT-allied Ma Bufang regime. Unlike traditional imperial practice, however, I argue that the United Front in Amdo was not a strategy for managing difference and asserting sovereignty. CCP leaders considered it a transformative methodology by which Amdo’s inhabitants were first to be made into minority nationalities and then into members of the multi-minzu socialist nation. Promising equality, autonomy, and prosperity, party leaders insisted that through the charismatic authority possessed by the traditional elites, the Party would be able to implement its program while also gaining direct access to the grassroots. Eventually, the fruits of these labours would convince the masses to request both full political integration and the transition to socialism. At that indeterminate point in time, the United Front would come to its peaceful conclusion.
While not articulated by its advocates in quite these terms, I argue that the United Front in Amdo was considered revolutionary praxis by which the ethnocultural diversity of the imperial domain could be refashioned within a socialist nation-state, all without resorting to the types of ethnocultural violence it accused the capitalist West of committing against its own minority and colonial populations. I show how within a few years the Party’s promises for a “gradual,” “voluntary,” and “organic” transformation of the Amdo region were overwhelmed by revolutionary impatience that in 1958 led to a massive rebellion and a brutal counterinsurgency. The spark was plans to collectivize pastoral regions, but, as Esherick remarks, the outbreak of anti-state violence always has multiple causes. In Amdo this included spillover from uprisings to the south in Kham, food shortages, and Anti-Rightist Campaign-adjacent threats to ethnoreligious institutions and practices. At its core, however, were the same types of prejudices, civilizing missions, and distrust of ethnocultural particularism that in various forms and degrees almost always accompany processes of minoritization. In Amdo, tens of thousands were arrested and tortured, including nearly all of the region’s religious and secular leaderships. Many thousands were killed. People were hunted down and shot in cold blood. Children were taken from their parents. Famine devastated the countryside. Communities were destroyed.
This is not meant to minimize the violence that many within the Han majority suffered under high socialism. However, we must also acknowledge the qualitative difference when state and majoritarian violence is marshalled against vulnerable, minoritized communities. As elsewhere, one consequence is that the symbols and stories states use to bind citizens to one another and to the nation can take on different meanings. For most Amdo Tibetans, there was no liberation in 1949 after a century of humiliation, and the dawn of the Reform era did not signal the end of ten years of leftist deviation. Instead, there was “year ’58” (nga brgyad lo), the moment “when the earth and sky were turned upside down.”[7] The United Front was meant to be a creative, progressive mechanism that would transform former imperial subjects into socialist citizens and knit them into the fabric of the socialist, Chinese nation. An arguably unprecedented undertaking, I note that there are many reasons to doubt the United Front could have succeeded had it not succumbed to both revolutionary and racist pressures. Nonetheless, Amdo was brought into the modern Chinese state through the overwhelming exercise of state violence, an original sin still well within living memory that to this day denies the party-state anything but a coerced legitimacy.
[1] Joseph W. Esherick, “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution,” Modern China 21, no. 1 (1995): 45–76.
[2] See, for example, Daniel Little, New Contributions to the Philosophy of History (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010).
[3] The PRC History Review 7, no. 1 (October 2022).
[4] Joseph W. Esherick, “How the Qing Became China,” in Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, eds. Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali, and Eric Van Young (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 229–259.
[5] Gerry Groot, Managing Transitions: The Chinese Communist Party, United Front Work, Corporatism, and Hegemony (New York: Routledge, 2004).
[6] Uradyn Bulag, Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China’s Mongolian Frontier (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).
[7] Naktang Nulo, My Tibetan Childhood: When Ice Shattered Stone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).