The Centre for Chinese Research is excited to present a talk by Professor. Joseph Esherick (Professor Emeritus of History, University of California at San Diego).
About The Talk:
In his book Accidental Holy Land, Prof. Joseph Esherick examined the rise of the Communist movement in Northwest China. After arriving in Shaan-Gan-Ning in 1935, the Communist Center transformed a ragtag guerrilla movement into a powerful political-military force that by the end of World War II was able to defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and rule China since 1949. All accounts agree that the Yan’an years were critical to the Communist victory, but what exactly was Yan’an like during the eight-year War of Resistance? Most accounts have focused on the rise of Mao Zedong and the rectification movement of 1942-44, but what about the years from 1937 to 1941? Can social history get beyond tired conventions of cave living and millet gruel? What exactly was the socio-political process that transformed Yan’an and eventually China?
About the Speaker:
Joseph W. Esherick received his B.A. from Harvard in 1964 and his PhD from Berkeley in 1971. His scholarship has focused on the last years of the Qing dynasty and the social and political transformation of modern China. His dissertation and first monograph, Reform and Revolution in China: the 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei explored the social background of China’s republican revolution. His book on The Origins of the Boxer Uprising won the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. Ancestral Leaves explored the tumultuous history of nineteenth and twentieth-century China through the lives of successive generations of one family. His new monograph, Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China, is a study of the founding of the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region of northwest China. In edited volumes, Esherick has analyzed Chinese local elites, the transformation of Chinese cities, American policy toward China during World War II, the Cultural Revolution, and the transition from empire to nation in comparative perspective, and the year 1943 in China. After forty years of teaching at the University of Oregon and the University of California at San Diego, Esherick retired in 2012 and now lives in Berkeley, California.
