Heroes, Martyrs, and Villains in 1930s Shaanbei: Liu Zhidan and His “Bandit Policy”

Although the name of Liu Zhidan is a celebrated one in the history of Chinese Communist organizing, Liu provided little hard information about his strategy for creating a revolutionary base in his native “Shaanbei.” Lacking trained recruits for his movement, he sought to win over as many as possible of the bandits created by the area’s widespread political and environmental disruption that had been ongoing since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the opprobrium in which bandits were generally held by Chinese people led most of his fellow revolutionaries to reject this approach, with the result that it has been ignored until now. To better understand Liu’s principles for popular mobilization, and also to show the options available to men of violence in the insurrectionary environment of Shaanbei, this article examines his relationship with three local bandit chiefs. Using hitherto overlooked sources together with personal interviews, it concludes that Liu’s success in winning over men like these owed more to his charisma than to their conversion to abstract revolutionary ideals, but that, for him, it was enough if this brought them around to an overall appreciation of the movement’s aims.