Jian Bozan

Jian Bozan (; April 14, 1898 – December 18, 1968) was a Chinese scholar and Marxist historian of Uyghur descent. Born in Taoyuan County, Hunan Province, Jian became an early supporter of the Chinese Communist Party. From 1952 to his death, he was Vice President of Peking University. Like many authoritative academic figures of his generation, he was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution over a perceived divergence between his own ideas and that of dominant Maoist orthodoxy of the time. Unable to bear torture, Jian committed suicide in 1968.

Biography Genealogical descent

"Jian" is very unusual surname in China. Jian Bozan traced his ancestry to Hala Bashi (哈勒八十) later Jian Bashi (翦八士) or Jian Baizhe (剪敗著) who was a Uyghur Buddhist from the Uyghur Buddhist Kingdom of Qocho who served the Emperor of the Ming Dynasty in quelling the earliest of the Miao rebellions by the Miao ethnic minority. The Emperor rewarded his family with the surname "Jian" . The Jian family then settled in Taoyuan County in Hunan province for generations. Some of Hala Bashi's descendants married Hui Muslims in Taoyuan, and their descendants are Muslim. However, most members of the Jian family in modern times are not Muslim.

Early years and education Jian was born in 1898.

In 1916, Jian entered school in Beijing, where he studied and conducted research about Chinese economic history. Believing that industry was China's savior, he travelled to the University of California in 1924 to research economics. During this time, he studied Anti-Dühring, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, The Communist Manifesto, and other famous Marxist works. He returned to China in 1926. He published his first Marxist interpretation of Chinese history during the 1930s, and joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1937. In 1934, while serving as secretary to Qin Zhen, deputy head of the Judicial Yuan, Jian went on a tour of numerous countries around the world. Jian also suffered from severe torture and was lynched at the hands of radicals. The ill treatment drove Jian to commit suicide. Jian, along with his wife, took an overdose of sleeping pills and died on December 18, 1968.

Jian was posthumously rehabilitated in 1978, at the behest of Deng Xiaoping.

Abridged list of publications Treatise on Chinese History Discussions of Historical Questions Anthology of Historical Works by Jian Bozan Historical Data and the Study of History Recent Capitalist Economy of the World A Course in the Philosophy of History An Outline of Chinese History History of the Qin and Han Dynasties Timeline of Chinese and Foreign History General Reference on Chinese History