Epilogue

The essential facts are clear. Twice defeated, routed from the revolutionary base areas they had constructed in nearly a decade of guerrilla war and land revolution, on the eve of the Sino-Japanese 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. ¹ Less than a decade later, the Japanese armies in China had been fought to a standstill. By the time of Japan’s 1945 surrender, Mao’s party-army held sway over 100 million people mainly in North, Northeast, and North Central China. In the course of the anti-Japanese resistance, the communists forged a broad coalition of forces that built, administered, and coordinated activities in widely dispersed rural base areas in China’s interior. The bases provided the springboard for nationwide victory in the subsequent civil war that ended in Kuomintang defeat and the establishment of the People’s Republic. These facts are clear, yet explanations for the communist victory and assessments of the character of the resistance, its global significance, and the relationship between Yenan communism and the subsequent course of revolutionary change and development in the People’s Republic and elsewhere remain controversial. In this chapter I examine major interpretations of the wartime resistance since the 1940s and conclude with a critical reassessment of the Yenan Way as a framework for analyzing the revolutionary praxis both of the Shen-Kan-Ning border region and of the wider wartime resistance.