Yan'an Rectification Movement

The Yan'an Rectification Movement (simplified Chinese: 延安整风运动; traditional Chinese: 延安整風運動; pinyin: Yán'ān Zhěngfēng Yùndòng) was a political mass movement led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1942 to 1945. The movement took place in the Yan'an Soviet, a revolutionary base area centered on the remote city of Yan'an. Although it was during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the CCP was experiencing a time of relative peace when they could focus on internal affairs.

The legacies of the Yan'an Rectification Movement proved fundamental to the subsequent history of the Chinese Communist Party, according to Kenneth Lieberthal. These included the consolidation of Mao Zedong's paramount role within the CCP, especially from 1942 to 1944, and the adoption of a party constitution that endorsed Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as guiding ideologies. This move formalised Mao's deviation from the Moscow party line and the importance of Mao's view of 'adaptation of communism to the conditions of China'. The Rectification Campaign was successful in either convincing or coercing the other leaders of the CCP to support Mao. Because the CCP had overcome great odds to grow and develop during this period, the methods employed in Yan'an were looked upon in reverence during Mao's later years. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao repeatedly used some of the tactics that had been successful in Yan'an whenever he felt the need to monopolize political power. To a large extent, the Yan'an Rectification Campaign began with the "systematic remolding of human minds".

The CCP made efforts to attack intellectuals and replace the culture of the May Fourth Movement with that of the CCP. The rectification movement is regarded by many as the origin of Mao Zedong's cult of personality.

In the 1930s the remote region of Yan'an had not experienced the same turmoil and hostilities as other mainland territories. Situated in northwest China, the area was also difficult to attack. CCP members mostly arrived there after the Long March (1934–1935). The area was known as a territory of camaraderie without corruption, though the Rectification Movement essentially changed everything.

The movement sought to eliminate ideological differences between cadres and intellectuals and to mold them into socialist new men. According to official CCP sources, the purpose of the Rectification Campaign was to give a basic grounding in the Marxist theory and Leninist principles of party organization to the thousands of new members who had joined the CCP during its expansion after 1937. A second, equally important aspect of the movement was the elimination of the blind imitation of Soviet models, obedience to Soviet directives (mostly communicated to China via the Communist International), and "empiricism". Mao emphasized that the campaign aimed at "rectifying mistaken ideas" and not the people who held them.

Modern research by Chinese and Western scholars, in particular the interpretation of history professor Gao Hua in his work How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945, have focused on the political nature of the Rectification Movement. According to Gao, the Rectification Movement had four purposes:

The Yan'an era had a profound effect on the CCP and its future fortunes. When the Communists completed the Long March, the CCP was a relatively small band of less than 10,000 worn out troops from the south, displaced to an isolated and poor area in the hinterlands of northern China. By the end of the Yan'an era, however, the CCP's forces had grown to nearly 2.8 million members, and it governed nineteen base areas that contained a population of nearly one hundred million people.

Party membership was strongly shaped by the devastation of the final battles for the Jiangxi Soviet, the Long March. With only a few original members of the CCP surviving until the end of the Yan'an period, the Party as of the mid-1940s consisted of 90% peasants recruited from the base areas of north China.