Leadership and Spontaneity: Recent Approaches to Communist Base Area Studies

PAGE l j name or term into our conversations with uncannily correct pronunciation ("consciousness," "instinct," etc.). Apparently because he had studied ~n­ glish at such a young age (six), his pronunciation somehow survived the eighty years that he did not use the language. (J) This mistake made me doubly mad because it was due to my own timidity and lack of confidence. When 1 searched for the monument in lY73, I found what a gang of street urchins had said was its base. The young boys led me into someone's courtyard where I found what looked like the monument, cut up into blocks ahd stored for future use. Before I could investigate further, the someone to whom the blocks belonged carne out of the house and angrily hustled me out of his yard. If I had had more faith that the pile was indeed the dismantled monument, then of course it would have been obvious that the monument had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. bg_adersh.!£ and §.EQntaneig..:_ R~en£ ~E!:oaches £.2 £.Q!!!!!!Unis£ Base ~~ Studies David Paulson. Stanford University One of the most interesting features of the Chinese Communist Party's history has been its effort to combine apparent irreconcilables -organization and discipline on the one hand, and spontaneous enthusiasm on the other. During the Sino-Japanese War the need to merge these tendencies was especially urgent. Facing a strong enemy (sometimes two -- both Japanese and KNrl' armies) ready to take advantage of any splits in its ranks,' the existence of the Party depended on maintaining tight organizational discipline · and control. At the same time in order to build its base of support the Party had to foster mass spontaneity and translate this into power. Nest studies of Communist base areas have addressed this problem in some form. Recent work both in Japan and the United States has furthered our understanding of how this contradiction was worked out in practice, and it is also one of the main problems I am exploring in my own work on the CCP Shantung Border District. Here I would like to review some of the recent work in Japan and the United States touching on this problem, and comment on the new picture of the base areas which is emerging. Base area studies has not been as active a field in Japan as in the United States. One reason for this has been the difficulty in gaining access to source materials. Japanese libraries do hold two types of materials that are unavailable in· other places (except for the Library of Congress which has some of these materials): 1. Hantetsu surveys of economic conditions in China, (2) and; 2. reports and maps on wartime China prepared by Japanese army and civilian intelligence services. These reports can be supplemented by memoirs written by Japanese soldiers who were stationed in China. (J) Japanese libraries, however, are weak in a crucial area. The Toyo Bunko does have copies of many CCP "open" materials, but few internal materials (~ang-ne1 k'an~) are available. Another reason for less activity in this field seews to be a lack of interest. Whether we accept the Chalmers Johnson thesis or not, we must recognize its contribution to stimulating serious research in the United States. Since no similar controversy has developed in Japan, more energy PAGE 14 has been put into the study of other topics. We can expect to see more work in this area in the future, however, since a Republican China Research Association was founded last year and interest in this topic is picking up. (4) The trend of recent research in Japan on Communist base areas has been described in Yamada Tatsuo's review of scholarship on Chinese political his tory in the past decade. (5) This review mentions two representative ar ticles written by Imai Shun and Yasui Sankichi. (b) Yamada states, "While admitting the CCP's leadership in the building of anti-Japanese revolutionary bases, they demonstrate that the masses participated spontaneously in the anti-Japanese movement and were not a mere 6bject to be organized by the CCP in a power vacuum caused by the Japanese invasion." Both of these articles depart...