How the Red Sun Rose

The author, Gao Hua, was raised during China's Cultural Revolution. During the Red August of 1966, when Gao was 12 years old, Gao's father came under attack and was forced to flee for fear of being beaten to death.[6]^: 164 Much of the violence Gao witnessed was announced in posters plastered around Gao's hometown, many of which mentioned the purge of authors, artists, and thinkers during the Yan'an Rectification Movement.[7]

Near Gao's home, a man in charge of a banned book warehouse let Gao borrow some, letting Gao read hundreds of banned books including essays and novels by Wang Shiwei and Ding Ling, authors who had been purged in Yan'an.[7]

In 1978, Gao entered Nanjing University and knew that understanding the Rectification Movement was key to understanding the traumas China had gone through. He then began to gather historical materials. Twenty-two years later, in 2000, he published How the Red Sun Rose: The Origin and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, 1930–45, for which Gao became known.[7]

The English version of Gao's book was translated by Brooklyn editor and translator Stacy Mosher and University of Wisconsin-Whitewater English professor Guo Jian; their translation was published in 2018 by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.[2][1]

Mao enjoyed a period of cooperative relationship with the CCP Central Committee's delegation in Jiangxi during his campaign to eliminate the Anti-Bolshevik League. The campaign was a large internal purge initiated by Mao in 1930,[note 2] triggering discontent that led to the Futian incident. The Central Committee delegation in Jiangxi declared the Futian incident counterrevolutionary, dismissed Xiang Ying's criticisms of the campaign, and resumed elimination of the Anti-Bolshevik League. From 1932 to 1934, Mao gradually lost power both in the military and the CCP. By September 1934, Mao was "completely excluded from the decision-making core".[6]^: 150

Mao regained power after the 1935 Zunyi Conference but was again disadvantaged by Wang Ming's 1937 arrival from the Soviet Union. Wang advocated for cooperation with the Kuomintang (KMT) in resisting Japan, which Mao opposed;[6]^: 151 Mao worried that fighting Japan would incur excessive losses to Communist forces and preferred to let Japanese armies weaken the KMT's forces instead.[6]^: 163 Initially thwarted by Wang's alliance with Zhou Enlai, Mao soon recovered: He ordered military leaders such as Zhu De and Peng Dehuai to lead the Eighth Route Army deep into Northern China to establish Communist Base Areas, resulting in the rapid expansion of Communist forces, while the KMT defended Wuhan against Japan and lost. Following Comintern head Georgi Dimitrov's verbal affirmation of Mao as leader of the CCP, Mao convened the Sixth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee in which he assailed KMT's capitulationism and gained a major victory over Wang.[6]^: 152

Following the disintegration of Wang's Comintern faction following the September 1941 Politburo meeting, Mao proceeded to launch the Yan'an Rectification Movement.[6]^: 153 Mao first called for criticisms from intellectuals to attack dogmatism. When the likes of Wang Shiwei called for equality and criticized the hierarchical system in Yan'an, Mao began to denounce liberalism.[note 3] The Rectification Movement then shifted to the cadre examination, anti-spy, and emergency rescue stages.[2]^: 899

The cadre examination in 1943 required every cadre to repeatedly write detailed personal and family histories, including all private thoughts and conversations. Their personal histories were then added to the personal dossier system, providing reasons for purges and spy-identifications.[2]^: 899 The emergency rescue campaign[note 4] mainly targeted intellectuals and cadres who had worked in KMT-controlled areas;[note 5] a quota of enemies were demanded from each work unit.[6]^: 154 To obtain confessions, schools, hospitals, and other work units strongarmed their targets with sleep and food deprivation, round-the-clock interrogation, twenty-four types of torture methods, and fake executions. Some were also executed.[6]^: 165 Those who had confessed being enemy agents would also have to implicate others.[2]^: 899 Gao cites Hu Qiaomu's memoir, which claimed that 15,000 secret agents were unearthed in Yan'an, a city with around 7,000 local residents and 30,000 CCP cadres in the 1940s.[2]^: 899 Some figures provided by Gao include 73 percent of Suide Normal School's students and staff, including a 6-year old primary school student.[6]^: 165 The emergency rescue campaign halted after former Comintern leader Dimitrov intervened at the end of 1943.[2]^: 900

Gao's book concludes with the Seventh Party Congress when Mao triumphed over his rivals in the CCP and held absolute power over the Party.[2]^: 900

Reprinted twenty-two times in traditional Chinese and nine times in simplified Chinese as of 2018, Gao's book has contributed to rewriting scholarly understanding of the Yan'an Rectification Movement.[note 1] Professor David Chang of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology notes that, whereas early scholarship subscribed to the idea that the Yan'an Rectification Movement was a "salubrious thought-reform process", Gao's book has transformed that impression into a repressing and violent one. According to Chang, contemporary scholars who wrote positively of the CCP and Mao, such as Edgar Snow, were "sold a bill of goods" and whose work were "rendered obsolete" by Gao's book.[2] Writer Ian Johnson writes that in addition to reconstructing history erased by the CCP, Gao also "uncovered a pattern" of how the CCP controls public information during the entire existence of the CCP.[7] French historian Lucien Bianco states that Gao's book provides a case study that renews people's understanding of the previously misunderstood Yan'an Rectification Movement.[6] Jan Kiely, Professor of China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, states that "this English version should finally demolish, for a global audience, whatever remains of the Edgar Snowian mythology of the CCP’s original moment of purity in Yan’an."[8]

Four reviewers of Gao's work, along with official CCP historians, criticize Gao's narrow focus on Mao's struggles with his rivals within the CCP and Gao's neglect of other aspects of history. Editor-in-Chief of the Beijing Spring, Hu Ping, acknowledged Gao's book as a classic in the study of the CCP's history while criticizing the book's undue emphasis on Mao and its lack of analysis of the CCP's role. He comments that in order for the "red sun" to rise, there needs to be a leader like Mao, but without a Party like the CCP, even with Mao, the red sun would not be able to rise.[9] Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, Joseph W. Esherick, criticizes that Gao's account of Mao's motivations is based partly on speculation rather than direct sources. Esherick also shares the critique of official CCP historians that Gao over-emphasized Mao's intra-party struggles and left out other aspects of the revolutionary history.[4]^: 10 Professor Kiely says the Gao's work is "imbricated with Maoist terminology" and has a limited scope to the top levels of the CCP due to his reliance on Party documents. Kiely adds that due to the CCP's filtering of documents released to the public and its rewriting of CCP history, Gao's work may eventually be recognized only for pointing future research to another direction while the fuller history has yet to be discovered.[8] Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, Tony Saich, says that Gao carried out "remarkable detective work" with his limited sources, but his focus on Mao's inner-CCP struggles make readers less aware of broader contexts such as the war against Japan and the United Front with the KMT.[10]

In 2020, the English version of Goa's book won Joseph Levenson Post-1900 Book Prize's Honorable Mention. Even though Gao's book's publication date did not satisfy the Prize's criteria, the Prize's committee stated that his work profoundly influenced people's understanding of the Chinese Communist Revolution and decided to give the prize for the first time to a twenty year-old publication; Gao was also the first mainland Chinese scholar to have received the prize.[1][11]

Notes

References

• Official website (English translation)