Historian: Mark Selden
Lived: 1938-
Nationality: American
Profession(s): Historian, academic and author
Books: The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (1971), China in Revolution: the Yenan Way Revisited (1995), Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China (2007).
Perspective: Left wing
Selden graduated from Yale with a doctorate in modern Chinese history. In 1968 Selden, along with Maurice Meisner and other Sinophile historians, became a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. This group lobbied to end American involvement in the Vietnam War by utilising their knowledge of Asia and exposing flaws in American foreign policy.
In 1971, Selden published his first significant work, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, an exploration of rising communism in the 1930s and its contribution to victories over the Japanese and the Nationalists. Selden offered an idealistic view of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its ideology, suggesting it “offers inspiration” to “men and women everywhere who seek to create a society free from stifling oppression [and] arbitrary state power”.
The Yenan Way was ignorant of evidence which has since come to light, however, it remains one of few definitive studies of the CCP during the Yan’an period. Some 24 years later Selden released a revised edition of The Yenan Way that admitted his errors, acknowledged new evidence and offered a revised assessment of the Yan’an period, describing the “dark side of mobilisational politics”.
Quotations
“The wartime resistance, with the Chinese communist movement at its centre, was a landmark event in the anti-colonial struggles that erupted in the decades following World War II.”
“The ability of communist revolutionaries to respond creatively and effectively to war aggravated problems of rural society lies at the heart of their popular success during the [anti-Japanese] resistance.”
“The essential facts are clear. Twice defeated, routed from the revolutionary base areas they had constructed in nearly a decade of guerrilla war… the Chinese Communist Party and its besieged army were essentially confined to a poor and peripheral area of the northwest, having narrowly escaped extermination during the Long March… By the time of Japan’s 1945 surrender, Mao’s party-army held sway over 100 million people.”
“Viewed as an integrated program, the Yenan Way represents a distinctive approach to economic development, social transformation and people’s war. Its characteristic features included popular participation, decentralisation and community power. Underlying this approach was a conception of human nature which held that people could transcend the limitations of class, experience and ideology, to act creatively in building a new China.”
“More and more the state seemed parasitic. Officials, compelled to drive people to work hard, felt themselves vital to the system. Revolutionary dynamics splintered society from the state, ‘us’ from ‘them’.”
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