The Emergence of Yan’an as a Revolutionary Icon
Yan’an became the revolutionary center of China after the Long March (1934-1935), a military retreat of the Red Army led by the CCP to Shaanxi Province in Central China. It started in Southeast China after the first Chinese Soviet Republic, founded in 1931 under the leadership of Mao Zedong, had failed under the attack of the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) Army commanded by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975).
The Red Army marched more than 9,000 kilometers within one year before arriving in Yan’an in October 1935. They turned the small city into a communist base whose aura of idealism proved to be attractive for leftist intellectuals, students, teachers, and writers, as well as landless peasants and soldiers. Between 1937 and 1940, approximately 100,000 people fled to the city that—comparing itself to the dictatorial and corrupt regimes of Chiang’s KMT and the warlords—represented itself as democratic and socially just, where “beggary and unemployment did seem to have been, as the Reds claimed, ‘liquidated’” and where “child slavery and prostitution had disappeared, and polyandry and polygamy were prohibited,” as reported by the American journalist Edgar Snow when visiting Yan’an in 1936 (1944, p. 241).Yan’an became a great laboratory of social experiments where the liberation of the Chinese people started and where the arrival of young intellectuals promised the establishment of a new, selfless society.2 Apter and Saich describe the history of Yan’an as follows: “It is a story people told themselves while they lived it and provides an uncommonly interesting example of beliefs becoming so powerful that they changed the way people acted, thought of themselves, and responded to others” (1994, p. 9). This narrative is reproduced over and over again in the Maoist era, with a 1959 booklet on the Buildings Commemorating the Revolution in Yan’an boldlydeclaring the town to be the headquarters of the struggle of the Chinese people and the sacred site of their revolution (Yan’an geming jinianguan, 1959, introduction).
The reality surely appeared otherwise. Yan’an was the first effective trial to establish full-fledged structures of ideological control where Mao not only consolidated his position of power by establishing Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as the guiding ideology but also pursued a new society by employing the methods of self-criticism and class struggle. In the realm of culture, the Yan’an Talks became the central text for guiding literature and arts, turning the Yan’an Soviet into a mobilization space that was public in nature but restricted private space severely (Apter and Saich, 1994).The story of Yan’an as the sacred site of revolution was already contributing to its development into a pilgrimage site in the 1950s. This is reflected in journals such as Tourism Journal (Luxing zazhi JMτ⅛⅛) and The Traveler (Luxingjia ^τM) that situated the revolutionary narrative in the arena of educational tourism. The former journal, founded in 1927, reports in a 1951 issue that the people of Yan’an at that time had inherited the fighting spirit that had been central to achieving liberation from both Japanese aggression and the oppression of the bourgeois KMT. To experience the historical struggle and to emulate that spirit, the report recommended visiting the Museum of the History of Revolution in Yan’an. Today, the museum still recognizes the significance of the Yan’anites’ spirit in its exhibitions (Figure 7.1).
As early as September 1948, several cave dwellings in the loess hills in Yangjialing—the place in Yan’an where Mao Zedong resided from November 1938 to October 1943—were transformed into a teaching facility for local primary schools. At the first summer camp, children drew pictures of Mao Zedong’s office and the Central Auditorium, where the Seventh National Party Congress had determined in 1945 the preeminent position of Mao and the enshrinement of his political ideology. These pictures were transformed into slides that served as visual material for study sessions for those who could not personally visit the sacred place.
In Zaoyuan—Mao’s next place of residence, from October 1943 to December 1945—neighboring peasants agreed after the communist victory to clean the chairman’s cave once a month as a sign of fond remembrance (Yan, 1953). A 1956 travel report by a certain Peixiang—written in a highly nostalgic mood—recalls memories of Yan’an upon revisiting it a decade later. The author describes the city as the mother of revolution and is highly moved by once again seeing the pagoda, the cave where he had lived in the 1940s, and of course, Mao Zedong’s cave dwellings in Zaoyuan.4Such descriptions of personal memories in travel reports show that tourism did not just emerge in the post-Mao era because of the growing consumer culture. Visits to important historical places combined with proper educational purposes were, in fact, approved in Maoist China, paralleling the concept of red tourism today.
Figure 7.1 Touristic Map of Yan’an: 1. Site of Remembering the Battle Defending Yan’an Performance, 2. Zaoyuan, 3. Yangjialing, 4. Wangjiaping, 5. Museum of the History of Revolution, 6. Yan’an Pagoda Hill, 7. Yan’an City Center (south of Yan River), and 8. Yan’an News Memorial Hall.3
Source: © Marc Andre Matten.