China is about to get new leaders for the first time in a decade, and it comes at a sensitive moment for the world's most populous nation. Economic growth, which surged for decades, has slowed. Demands for political reform have increased and the Communist Party has been hit by scandal. In a series of stories this week, NPR is examining the multiple challenges facing China. In our first story, Louisa Lim looks at how the Chinese view the Communist Party in the place where it took shape.
History is little more than a commodity in Yan'an, the town in western China that markets itself as the "Holy Land of China's Communist Revolution." The former revolutionary base of Chairman Mao Zedong is a place that encapsulates the strange ideological contortions China's Communist Party has twisted itself into over the past 63 years.
Mao and his comrades hid in the hillside caves of Yan'an in Shaanxi province for 13 years beginning in the 1930s, as they tried to build rural support for a communist revolution.