Yan’an Rectification Movement
옌안 정풍운동
The Chinese Communist Party’s ideological and organisational campaign launched by Mao Zedong’s February 1942 speech “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work”. Targeting “subjectivism, sectarianism and party formalism”, it displaced the dogmatism of Wang Ming’s Moscow-trained group and established Mao’s leadership and “Mao Zedong Thought”. Study, self-criticism and cadre screening were combined, and in Kang Sheng’s 1943 “rescue campaign” thousands were branded enemy agents. It became the template for later political campaigns.
In depth
Rectification ran in three phases. In the document study and discussion of 1942, cadres read assigned writings of Mao and party documents and examined their own thinking. Writers who criticised conditions at Yan’an, such as Wang Shiwei in “Wild Lilies” and Ding Ling in “Thoughts on March 8”, quickly became targets, and Mao’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” laid down that art must serve politics.
In the cadre screening and “rescue campaign” of 1943, Kang Sheng’s Social Affairs Department labelled large numbers of intellectuals and youths from the Nationalist areas as enemy agents, with group pressure and forced confessions widely used. Mao acknowledged the excesses in 1944 and restrained them under the rule of “no killing”, but no one was held responsible.
The 1945 “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party” rewrote party history as the vindication of Mao’s line, and the Seventh Congress wrote Mao Zedong Thought into the party constitution. Gao Hua’s research shows that rectification institutionalised Mao’s personal authority along with ideological unity, and the view that the methods of the anti-rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution originated here is widely accepted.