Marching Toward the Road of Marxist Historiography: Early Life of Fan Wenlan

Marching Toward the Road of Marxist Historiography: Early Life of Fan Wenlan depicts the detailed process of Fan Wenlan (1893–1969) shifting from “an inheritor of traditional Chinese studies” as a Peking University graduate in his early years, to “a master of new history” in Marxism in the 1940s. The book combines the perspectives of academic history, intellectual history, and biography.

Written by Yeh Yi-chun, a scholar from the Center for Chinese Studies in Taipei, Taiwan, China, the book tries to restore the specific process of Fan moving towards Marxist historiography from the perspectives of his family background and early learning process, early academic career and political ideas, and the peak and setbacks of his teaching career in the 1930s, as well as his academic and ideological changes after arriving in Yan’an.

Beyond outlining the first half of Fan’s academic career, the author showcases the development history of Marxist historiography in modern China with Fan as a lens. The book focuses on three important junctures when revolutionary history and academic history were interwoven.

The first is the outbreak of the May Thirtieth Movement from 1925 to 1927. Fan, who once indulged in textual research and hermeneutics, went to the streets from his study and participated in the Tianjin citizens’ parade. He recognized the difference between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China, and transformed his thoughts from “utopia” to communism through studying Nikolai Bukharin’s The ABC of Communism.

The second juncture involved the left-wing cultural movement in the North around the 1930s. In 1929, in order to unify cultural work, the CPC established the Central Committee for Cultural Work, which was directly under the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee. Under this influence, from 1930 to 1932, left-wing cultural groups were successively established in Peiping [present-day Beijing] such as the northern branch of the League of Chinese Left Wing Writers, the Peiping branch of the League of Chinese Social Scientists, and the Peiping League of Educational Workers. Fan was one of the main leaders of the Peiping League of Educational Workers, responsible for liaison work and organization, and actively rescued communists thrown into jail, for which he was twice arrested.

Third, since the 1940s, China’s Marxist historiography has gradually condensed into a community of historiography, which benefited from the Marxism-Leninism learning movement initiated by the CPC in Yan’an since the late 1930s. Through the study of Marxist-Leninist classics, historians gradually formed a relatively unified community of historiography. They made remarkable achievements in building the theoretical system of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, as well as in compiling a general history of China.

Ren Hu is from the Department of History at East China Normal University.