Joseph W. Esherick is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, San Diego and author of Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China, published by University of California Press and winner of the 2024 AAS post-1900 Levenson Prize honorable mention.

To begin with, please tell us what your book is about.

The book is about the origins of the Communist revolution in Northwest China. More specifically, it is a longue durée social history of the origins of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region. With Yan’an as its capital, Shaan-Gan-Ning became China’s “revolutionary holy land,” the heart of Mao Zedong’s Communist movement from 1937 to 1947. I started this project in 1988-89, during a year of archival research and field work in Northern Shaanxi (Shaanbei). At that time, I focused on changes that the revolution brought to village social and economic structures, but limited access to party archives forced me to return to my conventional social history inquiry into the origins of revolution. In the end, this led me back to a detailed inquiry into the political, social, and demographic changes of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), to the intellectual ferment of the early Republic, the guerrilla movement of the 1930s, and the replacement of the local revolutionary leadership after Mao and the Center arrived in 1935. In Accidental Holy Land, I sought to understand the Chinese revolution not as some inevitable peasant response to poverty and oppression, but as the contingent product of local, national, and international events in a constantly changing milieu.

What inspired you to research this topic?

First, having written books on Hunan-Hubei and on Shandong, and believing in the diversity of Chinese local environments, I wanted to move to another part of China. Second, I was always interested in social movements. Having written books on the 1911 Revolution and the Boxers, I wanted to turn to the big issue in modern Chinese history, the Communist revolution. Third, with my last Levenson Prize-winner, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, I thought I had a method of combining archives and oral history to generate original insights into local social history. These three concerns occupied me for thirty years, until this book finally matured.

What obstacles did you face in this project? What turned out better and/or easier than you expected it would?

Any inquiry into the Chinese revolution must confront the fact that in China, this is party history and its correct interpretation has been set by the same party-state that controls the archives and access to the field. One constantly has to recognize and deal sensitively with the individuals tasked with enforcing this orthodoxy, and yet pursue one’s quest for the truth as well as it can be known with the sources currently available.

What is the most interesting story or scrap of research you encountered in the course of working on this book?

During the initial year of research, supported by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, I was based in Xi’an. My host institution was quite uncooperative and unwilling to facilitate either archival access or field work. This went on for three months until I was finally able to use my contacts to visit the wife of the provincial party secretary, to whom I presented the Chinese translation of my book on 1911. Some days later, the party secretary’s private secretary (mishu) came to visit and said that my request for access would be approved, on the condition that I not mention the role of the party secretary. This I agreed to, but it turns out that there were additional conditions, noted in the letter than my hosts carried in the field. There were three points in that letter. I was not to read any records of important party meetings or personal dossiers—two limitations that I found reasonable: the latter being common in many archives, and the former involving questions in which I had no interest. But the final condition was more problematic: no inquiry into opium. I agreed, but found that the peasants of Shaanbei were not in the least restrained about mentioning opium in Shaan-Gan-Ning.

What are the works that inspired you as you worked on this book, and/or what are some other titles that you recommend be read in tandem with your own?

The history of the Chinese revolution is quite out of fashion in the English-language literature, so this book is really in dialogue with works in Chinese, especially with Yang Kuisong (杨奎松), Wang Qisheng (王奇生), and Huang Daoxuan (黄道炫). They were my real audience, and both guides and inspiration for this study. In English, any work on the revolution in the Northwest has to deal with Mark Selden’s Yenan Way,  but if I were to mention books that inspired my work, they would be outside the field of Chinese history, books like Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s Montaillou or Natalie Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre.

Finally, what has captured your attention lately—as a reader, writer, scholar, professor, or person living in the world?

All my life I have been interested in people unlike myself, and that has drawn me especially to Chinese peasants. I consequently find myself ill at ease in the new political and academic climate in which identity seems paramount. I worry that this discourages students from seeking to understand people with different experiences and histories, and that it implies that scholars are unqualified to write about people unlike themselves, as if people in earlier historical periods were just like us. I, on the contrary, came from an age when we were taught that “The past is a foreign country.”