Yan'an Rectification Movement

From Study Movement to Rectification

According to a 2021 article in China Organization and Personnel News, the Party leadership held that after the Zunyi Conference the intellectual roots of Wang Ming's "leftist" errors had not yet been dealt with, and that more than 700,000 new members who had joined since the start of the war mostly lacked Marxist education. On 19 May 1941 Mao Zedong gave the report "Reform Our Study" to senior cadres in Yan'an, beginning rectification study at the top. On 1 February 1942 he delivered "Rectify the Party's Style of Work" (originally titled "Rectify the Styles of Study, Party and Writing"), calling for "opposing subjectivism to rectify the style of study, opposing sectarianism to rectify the Party style, and opposing stereotyped Party writing to rectify the style of writing," followed by "Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing." The movement's watchwords were "learn from past mistakes to avoid future ones" and "cure the sickness to save the patient"; its methods were studying set documents, self-examination of one's thinking and work, and criticism and self-criticism.

According to a 2012 article in Guangming Daily, the Propaganda Department issued a decision on 3 April 1942 to discuss the rectification reports; from April to June 10,098 people in Yan'an took part; on 8 June the Centre extended the movement from Yan'an to the whole Party; and on 3 April 1943 it decided to continue rectification for another year.

Wang Shiwei and "Wild Lilies"

In March 1942 Wang Shiwei, a special researcher at the Central Research Institute in Yan'an, published the essay "Wild Lilies" in Liberation Daily in two parts on 13 and 23 March 1942, criticising the hierarchy of privileges in Yan'an. "I am not an egalitarian," he wrote, "but I see no necessity or justice in clothing divided into three colours and food into five grades," contrasting sick comrades who could not get a bowl of noodle soup and students who got two meals of thin gruel a day with "big shots" enjoying unnecessary privileges. Wang was then attacked during the rectification and later arrested; he was branded a "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist spy," a "hidden Nationalist agent" and a member of an "anti-Party clique of five," and in 1947, after the Party leadership evacuated Yan'an, he was killed on the march. On 7 February 1991 the Ministry of Public Security fully rehabilitated him.

Screening Cadres and the "Rescue Campaign"

In its later phase rectification was combined with the screening of cadres and the hunt for spies. Kang Sheng, who headed the Party's intelligence and security work, became chairman of the cadre investigation committee in August 1941 and vice-chairman of the General Study Committee in July 1942, with Mao as chairman. On 15 July 1943, in the Central Auditorium in Yan'an, Kang gave the speech "Rescuing Those Who Have Lost Their Footing" — "to rescue young people who have lost their footing we have the heart of a bodhisattva, but to resolutely suppress spies we have a will of steel" — which opened the so-called Rescue Campaign. The scholar Wu Yidi notes that few studies accept that the alleged spies really existed; he argues that Nationalist agents had indeed infiltrated the border region, but that the CCP consciously exaggerated the danger of civil war and greatly overestimated the number of spies. Tang Zong, who oversaw military intelligence for Chiang Kai-shek, wrote in his diary in August 1942 that the Nationalists had no inside sources among the Communists at all.

On 15 August 1943 the Central Committee issued its Decision on Screening Cadres. It stated that the screening was "not to be called a purge of counter-revolutionaries" and described the old method of extracting confessions — torture or disguised torture, random confessions implicating innocent people, and credulous acceptance of those confessions leading to arbitrary arrests, beatings and killings — as "an entirely subjectivist policy and method." It acknowledged that "excessively leftist actions will certainly occur," said that more than two thousand people had been identified in Yan'an, "some of whom were mistaken or wronged," and required that the wrongly accused "must be rehabilitated."

The History Resolution and the End of Rectification

From September 1943 rectification moved on to discussion of Party history. On 20 April 1945 the Seventh Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee adopted the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party, drafted by a committee convened by Ren Bishi with Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu and Luo Fu (Zhang Wentian) among its members and finally revised by Mao. It summed up the lessons of the Party's "leftist" errors, especially the third, and praised Mao's contribution; the Party treats it as marking the end of the rectification. The Seventh Party Congress later that year made Mao Zedong Thought the Party's guiding ideology.

Official Accounts and Scholarly Research

The Party describes the Yan'an rectification as a Party-wide campaign of Marxist education and "a movement of intellectual emancipation" that unified the Party's thinking and established Mao's leadership and the guiding role of Mao Zedong Thought. Wu Yidi notes that official Party history makes Kang Sheng the culprit for all the errors of the Rescue Campaign while presenting Mao as having launched a "correct" rectification and halted the excesses in time; he notes that scholars such as Chen Yung-fa, Dai Qing and Gao Hua have linked the Rescue Campaign to the rectification, with Gao affirming Mao's central role in the inner-Party struggle, and argues himself that Kang could not have launched the Rescue Campaign without Mao's support.