1943: China at the Crossroads

The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University presents a talk with Professor Joseph Esherick to discuss China's one critical year, 1943.

World War II was a transformative moment shaping the world we live in. In China, it was particularly important for it witnessed the gradual disintegration of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime and the rise of the Chinese Communists. At the beginning of the war, Chiang Kai-shek was the indispensable leader of China; while the Communists were a ragtag band of hearty survivors of the militarily disastrous Long March, holed up in the caves of Yan’an in the barren and impoverished hills of Northern Shaanxi. By the end of the war, the Communists had an army of a million men and a number of relatively stable bases behind Japanese lines, while Chiang Kai-shek’s National Government was increasingly viewed as an inept, corrupt, self-serving authoritarian regime.  How did this happen?  To answer this question, Esherick examines one critical year, 1943, when the Allies renounced the unequal treaties, Chiang Kai-shek met with Roosevelt and Churchill at Cairo, Mme Chiang Kai-shek made her memorable trip to the United States, the Communists launched a witch hunt for suspected spies, and millions of peasants perished in the Henan famine. Esherick probes the way in which the innumerable threads linking local, national, and international events can be unraveled by focusing on a single limited time when China advanced towards a critical crossroads in its history.

Joseph W. Esherick was born in California in 1942, received his B.A. summa cum laude 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 in the two provinces where it first broke out.  His book on The Origins of the Boxer Uprising won both the John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.  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. His most recent book, Ancestral Leaves, views the tumultuous history of nineteenth and twentieth-century China through the lives of successive generations of one family.  A Chinese translation won History Book of the Year award from the New History Collective, and was rated top 2014 book in the Humanities by Bookdao.com. After teaching for two decades at the University of Oregon, Esherick moved to the University of California at San Diego in 1990 to serve as Hsiu Professor in Chinese Studies.  He has lived, taught, and conducted research in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan, and served twice as director of the University of California Education Abroad Program at Peking University (1994-95 and 2010-11).  Esherick retired in 2012 and now lives in Berkeley, California.