Background
Fan Wen-lan was born in 1893 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China.
范文澜
Fan Wen-lan was born in 1893 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China.
After graduating from a middle school in P’u-tung (in greater Shanghai), he earned a degree in liberal arts from Peking University.
From the twenties until the mid-thirties when he joined the Communists in Yenan, Fan Wen-lan taught Chinese history at Nankai University in Tientsin and at Peking and Peking Normal universities, and he was also engaged in these years in the writing of history, particularly commentaries on Chinese classics.
In 1935 Fan Wen-lan was briefly detained as a "political criminal" by the Nationalist authorities, after which he taught for a short time at Honan University in Kaifeng before going to Yenan where he became president of the Central Research Institute. He was among the leading critics of some of the dissident intellectuals in Yenan, particularly the important Party writer-translator Wang Shih- wei. Like many other leading CCP authors, Fan Wen-lan was among those called upon to write the Party’s reply to Chiang Kai-shek’s famous treatise, China’s Destiny, following its publication in 1943.
Fan Wen-lan was primarily engaged during the Yenari years as a writer and ideologue, but he also served, at least nominally, in the legislative body of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region. He was elected as a delegate from Fu hsien to the Second Assembly of the Shen-Kan-Ning Government, and when its inaugural session was held in November 1941, Fan served on the presidium (steering committee). He was also among those who attended the second session in December 1944.
In the meantime, in 1941, Chung-kuo t’ung-shih chien-pien (A brief general history of China) was published as a text in Yenan, with Fan as the principal author.
When the Communist armies began to expand over parts of north China in the middle and late forties, a number of the Yenan-based intellectuals were dispatched to other Communist border regions. Thus, in 1946, Fan Wen-lan was sent to the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu- Yii) Border Region to assume the presidency of the newly established Northern University (Pei-fang ta-hsueh). Upon the merger of this school in 1948 with North China Associated University (Hua-pei lien-ho ta-hsueh) to form North China University (Hua-pei ta-hsueh), he became vice-president under President Wu Yii-chang.
In August of the same year Fan Wen-lan was elected as a member of the newly founded North China People’s Government (NCPG), headed by Party veteran Tung Pi-wu. When the NCPG moved from Shih-chia-chuang, Hopeh, to Peking in early 1949, he went to Peking, and in June he became a member of the newly established NCPG Higher Education Committee. He retained these posts until the NCPG was abolished and absorbed by the new central government in the fall of 1949.
In mid-1949 Fan Wen-lan became the secretary-general of the All-China Social Science Workers’ Conference, and in this capacity he attended the inaugural session in September 1949 of the CPPCC, the organ that brought the new government. From October 1949 until 1954 he served on the Standing Committee of the Association for Reforming the Chinese Written Language, but his major activities since the early fifties have centered around the continuing endeavors of the Chinese Communists to organize the social scientists.
In the early days of the PRC a special office (pan-shih-ch’u) was established to oversee the formation of five societies dealing, respectively, with philosophy, history, economics, political science, and law. Fan Wen-lan was chairman of this office, and concurrently he and Wu Yii-chang were vice-chairmen under Kuo Mo-jo of the China New History Research Society’s Preparatory Committee. When the new societies were established in the early fifties, the special office that Fan had headed went out of existence, but he has retained his vice-chairmanship of the historical society since its formal establishment in July 1951. He received a closely related appointment in May 1950 when he became director of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Modern History.
In May 1954 Fan Wen-lan was named to the Board of Directors of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. He served throughout the term of the First NPC as a Honan representative, but in the Second NPC (1959-1964) he represented Shantung. Then, when the Third NPC was elected in late 1964, he was elected from his native Chekiang. He has also served as a Standing Committee member of the Academy of Sciences’ Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences since it was established in May-June 1955. Fan Wen-lan received recognition for his contributions to the Party when the CCP held its Eighth Congress in September 1956 and elected him to alternate membership on the Central Committee.
Relatively little is known about Fan’s personal life. His wife (as of 1945) was a woman named Tai Lao, but nothing further is known of her.
