Fan Wen-Ian (1891-), the most prominent Marxist historian in Communist China and the director of the institute for the study of modern history of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Peking.
Little is known of Fan Wen-lan's family background or his childhood except that his native place was Shaohsing, Chekiang, and that he was a poverty-stricken youth when he entered Peking University. Among his teachers were Gh'en Han-chang and Huang K'an (q.v.), both scholars of the traditional school, who guided Fan's study of the Chinese classics. During his student days he absorbed some of the ideas propounded by Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Li Ta-chao (qq.v.), but he did not take an active part in the nationalistic student activities of the period. He was graduated from Peking University in 1919.
Fan went to Japan for further study, but was unable to afford the tuition required for university enrollment. He remained in Tokyo for two years, studying on his own the Writings of Kawakami Hajime, Makino Xara, and other Japanese intellectuals who were attracted by Marxism. He returned to China about 1921 and spent the next few years teaching Chinese history and literature at various institutions in north China: Nankai University, Peking University, Peking Normal University, Fu-jen (Catholic) University, and Sino-French University. In 1929 he was named professor of history at the womens college of Peking University. He later became dean of the college. Fan Wen-lan's reputation as a scholar was established in 1925 with the publication of Wen-hsin tiao-lung chu [annotations on the Wenhsin tiao-lung], which he prepared under the guidance of Huang K'an and which came to be considered one of the best editions of Liu Hsieh's sixth-century classic of literary criticism. It was reprinted in 1936. In 1929 Fan published the Shui-ching-chu hsieh-ching-wen ch'ao [selections descriptive of scenic view-s excerpted from the Shui-ching-chu]. A volume of commentaries on the 25 official Chinese dynastic histories, Cheng-shih k'ao-lueh, appeared in 1931 ; two years later Fan's Ch'un-ching kai-lun [a general discussion of the Confucian classics] was published. Fan was known among his intimates for his austere personal life and for his generosity toward needy students. A deeply patriotic man. Fan was disturbed by the deteriorating political situation in north China. A major student demonstration against the National Government's foreign and domestic policies took place on 9 December 1935; it was followed by similar demonstrations in other cities. The local authorities at Peiping, saying that the demonstration was Communist-inspired, arrested many of the participants. Fan was arrested that year on the charge of having assisted a colleague who allegedly was involved in the Communist movement. He Was imprisoned at Nanking and was brought to trial. -University authorities in Peiping attempted to intercede on his behalf, but their representations .failed to convince Wang Shih-chieh (q.v.), the minister of education, of Fan's innocence. It was only through the efforts of Ts'ai Yuan-p"ei and Wang Chingwei that he eventually was released. In very poor health, Fan spent a year in a hospital. He then accepted a professorship at Honan University, for which he had been recommended by the Well-known historian of the Ch'ing period Hsiao I-shan.
After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, Fan began to participate in the Communist underground movement in Honan. In 1940 he went to Yenan, the Chinese Communist wartime capital. He taught at Anti-Japanese University and North Shensi College. In addition, he organized and directed the Chungkuo li-shih yen-chiu-hui [Chinese historical research association], which sponsored the publication of the Chung-kuo t'ung-shih chien-pien [short history of China]. Written by a group of seven historians headed by Fan Wen-Ian, the work received official Communist endorsement when it was published at Yenan in 1941 and was widely used in the Communist-controlled areas of China during the war. In 1943 Fan became director of the Central Research Academy at Yenan. Three years later, he was named president of Pei-fang University, and when that institution was reorganized as North China University, he became its vice president. He also served as a deputy in the Shansi- Hopei-Shantung-Honan border area government. In January 1949 he was elected a deputy to the newly established North China People's Government.
Fan Wen-lan's writings of the 1940's were propagandistic in both intent and presentation. They were in the vernacular, in contrast to his pre- 1937 volumes, which had been in sedate classical Chinese. The Chung-kuo Cung-shih chien-pien was intended to provide political justification for a revolutionary war directed against both the foreign invader and the regime controlled by the Kuomintang. In this work, Chinese history is presented within the framework set down by Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese Communists in 1939-40, and the great corpus of traditional Chinese history is allotted to the so-called feudal period, defined as beginning with the Chou period and lasting until the mid-nineteenth century. The feudal period is characterized by economic exploitation and political oppression of the mass of the population by the ruling class, headed by the emperor and the landlords. The peasants are described as existing in dire poverty and suffering. The recurrent peasant rebellions through the centuries are shown as notable indicators of the suffering of the great majority of the Chinese people in pre-modern times. Fan held that, although some social progress followed each peasant outburst, the nature of the social and economic system in traditional China blocked reform and prevented progress. Chung-kuo fungshih chien-pien was written in 18 months and bore evidences of hasty preparation. Revised editions, less dogmatic in tone and more careful in attention to historical sources, appeared after 1948. Fan Wen-Ian wrote other works designed to apply Chinese Communist doctrinal analysis to problems in modern Chinese history. His 1944 booklet entitled Han-chien k'uai-tzu-shou Tseng Kuo-fan te i-sheng [life of the traitorous executioner Tseng Kuo-fan] is a political tract condemning the prominent nineteenth-century Hunanese scholar-general as a traitor because of his actions in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion. By implication, it is an attack on the Kuomintang for glorifying Tseng Kuo-fan as a model statesman and patriot. T'ai-p'ing Vienkuo ko-ming yun-tung [the revolutionary movement of the Taiping heavenly kingdom], published in 1948, emphasizes the economic and social reforms instituted by the Taiping leaders in spite of ferocious attacks by the imperial Chinese armies, which were aided by the Western nations. The booklet decries the lengths to which the "class enemy" of the peasant masses of China was willing to go in order to perpetuate its own political power; again, the work was an oblique reference to the post- 1928 Kuomintang and to its Western supporters. Work on the Chung-kuo chin-tai shih [history of modern China] was begun during the war. It was intended to be a multi-volume study of modern Chinese history, divided into two periods: the era of the old democratic revolution (1840-1919) and that of the new democratic revolution (1919-). The first volume, published at Yenan in 1945, begins with the Opium War (1839-42) and ends with the Boxer Uprising of 1900; it is dominated by the twin themes of class struggle and foreign imperialism. Fan Wen-Ian participated in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in 1949 as a member of the delegation representing the social sciences. In 1950 he was named director of the institute of modern history of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at Peking. In 1951 he became vice president of the China Historical Association. He was a delegate to the National People's Congress in 1954, 1958, and 1964, and he was a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in 1961. Although Fan Wen-Ian presumably had been a member of the Chinese Communist party for some years before 1949, he had not been active in party affairs. His service to the Communist cause in China was rewarded, however, when he was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee at the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party in September 1 956. After 1949, Fan devoted most of his energies to the work of the institute of modern history of the Academy of Sciences at Peking, the principal national center for the advanced training of Chinese historians and for the compilation and publication of source materials. The institute supported 30 researchers in 1953 and about 200 in 1958. Fan also was a member of the editorial committee that supervised the compilation of the six-volume work on the Xien-chün [the Nien army], published in 1953.
Fan Wen-lan's willingness to permit political commitments to influence his interpretation of historical problems is not dissimilar to the didactic outlook of traditional Chinese historiography. In addition to recording data, the official historians of traditional China, in effect, were constructing a body of precedents and ethical standards to guide future generations of bureaucrats. Fan and his disciples also have been devoted to the concept of history as a guide to current policies. Fan Wen-lan's prominence was the result of his ability to bring his training and reputation in traditional Chinese scholarship to the service of a new orthodoxy which blended Marxist-Leninist concepts with the events of modern Chinese history. Fan Yuan-lien T. Ching-sheng [14]
