POLITICAL PROSPECTS IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC
Revolution, Warlords, and Diaspora, 1912–1926
From the fall of the Qing in 1911 until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Hainan island became increasingly isolated from politics on the national stage. The island’s government had only occasional significant contact with the central authorities from 1911 to 1930, when the leadership of Guangdong Province (which then included Hainan) effectively declared its regional independence. Peng Chengwan’s 1920 survey was an exception to this trend, and thus it is a rare insight to Hainan in this period beyond the writings of foreign missionaries and other travelers. In the early republic, Hainan’s turn away from the central government reflected the broader political atmosphere throughout China in which provincial leaders gained strength in relation to a weak national authority in Beijing.
By the late 1910s, Chinese advocates of a more federalized national polity put forth their ideas in newspapers and political debates, and gained support among some members of the National Assembly as well as prominent citizens in their home provinces. The impetus for increasing regional power, however, came from extremely divergent perspectives, including a diverse spectrum of voices from the most progressive intellectuals to the most conservative warlords. The lack of common ground prevented the federalist issue from becoming a clear and strong political platform, and weakened it in the face of the eventual rise of the centralized authority of the Nationalist Party in the mid-1920s.1
Though federalism ultimately failed as a ruling philosophy in the early republic, provincial militarism gave several provinces de facto autonomy in the 1910s and 1920s, if not a stake in a harmonious federated government. Some called these regional military governors “warlords,” but whatever their label, they forced a rough-hewn federalism on the weak central government, in the absence of any centralizing ruler or ruling platform. The various revolutionary credos that had brought about the end of imperial China in 1911 actually shared few specific aims other than opposition to Qing rule by the minority Manchus. The project to construct a national consciousness from these diverging factions, therefore, produced a brand of patriotism that was initially weaker than residual local and provincial identities. According to historian John Fitzgerald, in his assessment of the longue durée of Chinese provinces in history, “Attempts to balance the age-old demands of center and province in the twentieth century were compounded by an additional problem common to revolutionary states: the need to build new state structures on unorthodox ideological, social and economic foundations.”2
Many regional leaders opposed the new project of cohesive, modern nation-building, and instead chose to strengthen their regional bases rather than throwing in their lot with the feeble national government. Hainan had its own regional leaders, and in keeping with the traditional Chinese adage, Tian gao huangdi yuan (Heaven is high and the emperor is far away), in China’s deep south, the great distance from central authority made their brand of regionalism especially potent. While China does not have exactly the same historically fraught divide between north and south as the United States, cultural and political divisions between northern and southern China have been strong in most periods of its history, with hostility and resentment near the surface even in times of peace. In their recent examinations of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), which largely split the country into a rebellious south and a north that hoped to preserve the empire, Stephen R. Platt and Tobie Meyer-Fong cast the conflict as the seminal event of the nineteenth century; both authors draw numerous comparisons with its contemporary American Civil War.3 The legacy of Qing success in suppressing this conflict, according to both authors, was not simply the reinforcement of the dynasty’s rule, but more significantly, it provided traction for the growing resentment in an alienated south that continued to hum with revolutionary energy until the dynasty’s demise in 1911 and beyond.
In another of John Fitzgerald’s works, this one on Guangdong separatism, he notes that the Guangdong ruler, Chen Jitang (1890–1954), effectively declared the independence of his province (which included Hainan) when he withdrew his support for the Nationalists’ Nanjing government in the early 1930s. From 1911 through the end of the 1920s, Guangdong’s regional rulers had changed often and violently. Guangzhou (Canton) was an early center of the revolutionary movement that overthrew the Qing government in 1911, and then continued to resist the rule of the republican government under Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), which lasted from 1912 until Yuan’s death in 1916, and continued under his several militarist protégés. Guangdong political leaders remained at odds with most in the parade of short-lived northern regimes that followed, but also saw the occasional violent appearance within their region of a militarist ally of Beijing who made some temporary political and territorial gains.
By the time of Chen Jitang’s effective declaration of independence, it was actually not the northern warlords, but the new revolutionary regime in Nanjing that he was cutting ties with. Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi, 1887–1975) and the Nationalists had successfully ousted the Beijing government in 1927 and moved the capital south to Nanjing. The persistence of regional power was proven in Chen’s actions, even opposing the new southern regime that shared its Guangdong political origins. Southern independence took on a new ferocity in this era. It is noteworthy that in the 1930s, Guangdong, as the southern birthplace of China’s republican revolution, became one of the most autonomous territories in China, maintaining strained relations with the Nanjing government that it helped to create.4
Chen Jitang’s effective independence was the culmination of two decades of southern separatism and revolution. This regionalism frustrated calls to patriotism and unity in these formative and troubled decades. We mark certain events as watersheds in the nationalist and patriotic history of China, such as the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, and, of course, the long anti-Japanese resistance struggle beginning in the early 1930s. But in such a vast country as China, these events did not easily or immediately galvanize a population and transform the disintegrated nation into a modern national polity. Doubtless events as traumatic as the Japanese invasion served to create a strong negatively defined sense of national identity—a culture of resistance that is as coherent as any foundation for modern nationalism. And yet even the Japanese invasion (let alone the urban-based and intellectual-driven May Fourth and May Thirtieth movements) certainly had varied impacts throughout the country that cannot be painted in one retroactive hue of countrywide experienced nationalism. In Hainan, the period from 1911 through the Japanese invasion of the island in 1939 saw the development of a revolutionary movement that was distinct in the quality of being shaped by local and regional events.
It was in this context of disunity, as a district under the administration of Guangdong, that the Communist movement on Hainan began to take shape in the mid-1920s. Hainan’s leaders did not hope to construct an independent satrapy on the island, but rather a provincial administration that was increasingly tied to the national government. Local conflicts and persistent militarism frustrated their efforts to incorporate the island into the national polity. The causes of the inward turn on Hainan were many, including factors such as the island’s obvious geographical isolation; strained and tenuous relations between Hainan islanders and the once-supportive “bourgeois” overseas Hainanese community; a perennial perception, on the part of some Hainanese, of mainland political envoys (including Communists) as officious and exploitative; a stubbornly provincial and perhaps simplistic Hainanese perception of anti-imperialism and class struggle.
From the mainland and abroad, Hainan’s inward turn and isolation was reciprocated in the low estimation of the island’s importance even to the point of Sun Yat-sen’s (1866–1925) alleged willingness to sell off Hainan’s economic sovereignty to the Japanese in exchange for guns and cash, which was not uncharacteristic of Sun’s efforts to essentially mortgage portions of the country that were not always within his control. Hainan’s revolutionaries played their part in the national Chinese revolution, whether it was the 1911 revolution, the Nationalist conquest, or the Communist revolution. The prominence of some of them would bring the island of Hainan into a position of newfound importance in national politics, or at least this was the expressed hope of many political activists whose roots and priorities were in Hainan in the twentieth century.5 After the fall of the Qing in 1911, Hainanese progressives and revolutionaries in the early republic were tied especially close to the mainland southern revolution and Sun Yat-sen. One similarity in the republican movement of the early twentieth century on Hainan was the international orientation of these early revolutionaries, though there was also a streak of antiforeign animosity on Hainan that sometimes came to the surface in violence.
Haikou housed several consulates and had been forcibly opened as a treaty port hosting foreign trade since the Treaty of Tianjin in 1860 ended the second Opium War.6 The implications of this foreign presence on Hainan were widely known—extraterritoriality, missionary activity, and foreign tariff control. Anti-imperial sentiment was sometimes expressed in an organized way through student groups and fundraising in Southeast Asia, Japan, and around the world, but it could also erupt in seemingly random acts of violence, labeled outrages of “Boxerism” by the foreign press, recalling the antiforeign and anti-Christian movement of the turn of the century.
In the early twentieth century, minor disturbances that brought to mind this recent harrowing experience for foreigners in China often led to an increased gunboat presence around Haikou or requests for this, as well as executions and heavy indemnities. One such incident was the murder of Reverend George D. Byers, of the American Presbyterian Mission Society in June of 1924 in Jiaji (then called Kachek by foreigners). The ensuing legal battle reflected the Byzantine complexity of American and Chinese diplomacy and governance, as well as the Presbyterian Church authorities. The challenges to the resolution of the diplomatic crisis that resulted from the Byers killing involved the sensitivities of a strong new nationalism developing throughout China, and even at the ends of the earth in Hainan.7 But banditry such as the Byers incident is obviously not the kind of patriotic anti-imperialism expressed in student protest or worker strikes. Anti-imperialism, xenophobia, and nativism seem to overlap in a complex and sometimes messy way on Hainan. One American observer who had been a guest of Byers only weeks before his murder suggested that indeed the line between Hainan’s soldiers and bandits was a blurry one. He wrote in 1925, “A few of these immature rowdies in ragged semi-uniform commonly miscalled soldiers of China were loafing and gambling about Kachek [Jiaji], but I saw none at all in Hainan compared with Canton [Guangzhou] and many another place on the mainland. It seems there were plenty [of soldiers], but most of them were up country fighting the bandits, for robbery and brigandage were rampant in many parts of the island.”8
The unclear distinction between banditry and soldiery was a common problem in China in this era, and indeed one observer’s brigand was another’s patriotic militiaman. But suspicion of foreigners had a very long history in Hainan, going back even to the Ming dynasty. In 1583, a vessel carrying Franciscan friars and laymen through the South China Sea was forced by a tropical storm to seek shelter on Hainan. Their hosts on Hainan presumed that they were all foreign spies and sent them to Guangzhou (Canton), where local Portuguese authorities purchased their freedom.9
The French Catholic history on Hainan was also a long one, but by the early twentieth century, their interest in Hainan had expanded significantly since their neighboring mainland holdings in Indochina put the island within its “sphere of influence.” Besides proselytizing and tariff control, the French on Hainan were also the most dominant foreigners in the coolie trade, supplying workers to projects around the globe. These workers often lived in a legal gray area between outright slavery and volunteer servitude. In the center of Haikou, French traders had set up a prominent barracoon, or holding pen for their human wares. In 1913, local activists frustrated the operation of this French business. In the few records of this event, an unnamed member of the Revolutionary Party (Gemingdang) initiated an act of sabotage to the French going concern. In what was later called the “Pigsty Smashing Incident,” the barracoon was destroyed and one of its minders killed. Although there are few sources on the incident, Chinese sources remember it as a blow struck for anti-imperialism on Hainan, because thirty of the chained coolies were freed instead of being shipped off by their French masters.10 The Pigsty Smashing Incident and the murder of Reverend Byers represent localized incidents that are only vaguely connected to the anti-imperialism and Chinese nationalism that intellectuals and political leaders on the Chinese mainland and in the global Chinese community were expressing so eloquently at the same time. In some ways, they represent both ends of the spectrum of political activism and revolutionary violence on Hainan, with brigands on one end and liberators on the other. The reality was, of course, rarely this clear.
But the Hainanese revolutionary movement was also connected to this level of revolutionary rhetoric beyond its shores. In the late Qing and early republic, some Hainanese merchants and activists took part in the cosmopolitan revolutionary movement. Hainanese identity was perhaps paradoxically a mixture of both virulent nativism and wealthy cosmopolitanism. The revolutionary impetus of the 1910s was both the republican consciousness of Hainan’s diaspora and the hot-blooded Hainanese nativist resistance to extractive foreign presences on the island, sometime referred to in Chinese as paiwai, which can mean a kind of antiforeignism that essentially resists all outside forces. This thread within the fabric of Hainanese identity would be woven closely into the Communist movement on the island, and give rise to concerns among the mainland Communist leadership that Hainan would be difficult to bring into a subordinate relationship with central rule.
In the late 1920s, the Communist movement on Hainan became a violent and localized conflict that effectively shed the national, let alone international, ideology, and spirit. The line from Hainan’s globe-trotting merchants and newspapermen like Lin Wenying (1873–1914) to Communist guerrilla leaders like Feng Baiju (1903–1973) is a clear one, and both ends of the trajectory represent an important side of the island’s cultural and revolutionary character. But the path from one to the other was not a smooth or consistent one.
In the early years of the republic, Hainan’s prominent leaders did not think of the island as being isolated in every sense. Thousands of Hainanese people left their island to find work throughout the world, and often maintained connections to their island home through remittances and Hainanese associations in their new homes. While some of the Hainanese diaspora anticipated a short stay, many made permanent homes abroad, in the Americas, Australia, Europe, and especially in neighboring Southeast Asia. At the time of writing, the Hainanese provincial government claims that three million Hainanese live abroad, more than a third of the total 8.5 million people living on the island itself (as of a 2007 census).11
Song Yaoru (Charlie Soong, 1863–1918), a native of Wenchang, Hainan, was perhaps the most famous of Hainan’s wandering sons. Song was the patriarch of the most powerful family in twentieth-century China, with three daughters who married Sun Yat-sen, H.H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi, 1881–1967), and Chiang Kai-shek; and a son, T.V. Soong (Song Ziwen, 1891–1971) who would rise nearly to the pinnacle of political and economic power in China. In spite of (or perhaps because of) the huge popularity of Sterling Seagrave’s account of the Song family, academic historians generally overlook Song’s importance in modern Chinese history.12 Song was certainly an important financier of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary efforts, and as a Hainanese was comfortable traveling the world.13 Born to a family of little means, he built his fortune on personal and professional affiliations and on bible sales, to ultimately live a life of cosmopolitan comfort.
Hainan’s merchants and politicians like Song were aware of, and deeply involved in, the anti-Qing revolutionary movements throughout the region and throughout the world in the final years of the Qing. The island’s central location in eastern Asia was reflected in the cosmopolitan outlook of its merchants, intercontinental migrant workers, and its progressive leaders in the late Qing and the early republic. In the first decade of the twentieth century, as the Qing monarchy attempted to reform itself, revolutionary activists traveled throughout the world raising money to fund their plots to overthrow the ruling Manchus, and Hainanese were prominent among those late Qing and early republican revolutionaries. While nationalism grew among this global network of revolutionary organizers and financiers, provincial loyalties also served to rally revolutionary and republican enthusiasm. Newspapers, for example, were printed and read in communities of Chinese abroad with a provincial or regional target audience in mind.14
In a study of Guangzhou (Canton) in the first two decades of Communist rule, Ezra Vogel examined the regional foundations on which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was built. He noted that certain “Cantonese traits” were pervasive not only in that city, but throughout Guangdong Province, the expansive southern region, and even among the overseas communities that traced their ancestry to that area.15 In his study of Guangdong during the revolution that ended the Qing, Edward Rhoads found that a globally connected merchant class had begun to challenge the traditional gentry in the southern region. The prominent role of merchants in the revolutionary movement reflected the outward and worldly orientation of the coastal Guangdong population, and also that of Hainan, where regional domestic and international trade flourished. In the final years of the Qing, the merchant class had begun to expand its local power and influence, especially following the 1905 abolition of the Confucian examination system that had once been the only channel to political power. New chambers of commerce and educational institutions formalized and reinforced the power of prominent local merchants, and strengthened this distinct attribute of the southern coastal elites.16
But southern Chinese bonds were even stronger and more complex than these new political and economic developments. In the early and mid-seventeenth century, Ming loyalists had retreated to the south for their last stand during the conquest that brought it low and in the early years of its successor, the Manchu Qing. For the Ming loyalists and any Chinese simply fleeing the Manchu conquerors, Hainan became a temporary refuge at the end of the earth. Today, one of the great tourist attractions of all China is a rock formation on the southern coast of Hainan called Tianya haijiao, which roughly translates as “the edge of the earth.” Hainan was a hotbed of Ming loyalism, and as the Manchu Qing dynasty became more and more a fact of life, those loyalists melted into the population of Hainan, as in other parts of China. But for many, their resentment remained, either in specifically anti-Manchu racial hatred, or in more generally rebellious societies that could become bandits, criminal gangs, or more organized resistors of imperial rule. The southern coast caused anxiety for those shipping through the South China Sea, for seasonal piracy was a constant lure for young men who could not sustain themselves on terra firma, whether due to drought or warfare, flood or famine. The most organized and violent of these movements produced by the southern provinces was of course the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). Its millenarian and anti-Manchu reason for being dovetailed with the rebellious secret societies of the south, some of which still professed allegiance to the Ming loyalists of centuries earlier.
Sun Yat-sen had been an especially inspiring figure among overseas Chinese, many of whom were connected to Hainan through birth or through kinship and native-place associations that were a primary structure within the societies of overseas Chinese. During the tumultuous nineteenth century, emigration from southern China increased dramatically to meet the labor needs of imperial and domestic infrastructure projects of the Western powers throughout their realms. From South Africa, to Cuba, to Peru, to Southeast Asia, and the American West, Chinese laborers were important in building and working the cities of the world.17
In the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, there was a surge of Hainanese migration and movement between the island and mainland southeast Asia, as well as to the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Junks full of Hainanese immigrants sailed on the strong but dangerous late summer and autumn monsoon winds. Those junks that successfully navigated the rough seas would land on the shores of Malaya. The men would sometimes find their way to their Hainan contacts waiting in Malaya, but, according to Victor Purcell, the Malay Immigration Department functioned “very satisfactorily.” Many of these Hainan immigrants were apprehended by the Malay authorities, and promptly shipped back to Hainan.18
Hainanese coherence abroad remained strong in native place associations and the usual Chinese provincial clustering occurred of Hainanese within certain occupations, in this case, as domestic servants and mechanics. In 1919, the American missionary, Margaret Moninger, noticed the significance of the ties of Hainan to Southeast Asia. “Many of the men develop the wanderlust and go by junk to Siam, the Straits Settlements, or Burma, where they become house servants or ships’ boys, work on rubber plantations or in mines, or possibly go into business in shops.” Moninger noted that it was common to meet Hainanese who spoke perfect English, acquired during long stays in British Malaya or Hong Kong. She also remarked on the death rituals that connected Hainan island to the communities of Hainanese who traveled abroad: “… many of the men die in the south, and down country here one will sometimes see a row of eight or ten graves, in such regular order as to excite curiosity. On inquiry, these are found to be the graves to which the souls of the deceased have been called, and in which a frog or some other small animal has been buried with all the usual ceremonies.” Moninger also wrote that some of these men who traveled to British colonies returned to visit Hainan after having converted to Christianity. Some of them, having gone abroad for their work without their wives, and being about to set out alone again, implored Moninger and other missionaries to accept their wives into their mission schools.19
While many of these overseas Chinese (Huaqiao) became part of a permanent community in their new respective homes, many also continued to travel back and forth between their adopted homes and their native China. But even those who did not return to China maintained their strong cultural identity, often resisting the hyphenated designation of Chinese-Americans, Chinese-Africans, and so on.20 This group of overseas Chinese had a distinct character and place in Chinese society when and if they did return. In some instances, the Chinese government deemed parts of the Chinese population as overseas Chinese even though they had moved permanently back to their native province. Under the Communist regime beginning in 1949, for example, 20 percent of Guangdong’s population living within that province (then including Hainan) was considered to be Huaqiao, or overseas Chinese, simply because of their connections or their personal experience in foreign countries.21
In the waning years of the Qing, worldly revolutionaries like Lin Wenying organized anti-Manchu propaganda everywhere they could.22 Lin, like Song Yaoru, traced his ancestral roots to Wenchang, the northeastern city that produced many of Hainan’s most prominent scholars and wealthiest merchants. He was actually born in Bangkok, Siam (Thailand) to a wealthy family, the son of a Wenchang merchant and a Thai mother. According to Philip Kuhn’s study of Chinese emigration in this period, the marriage of Chinese merchants, craftsmen, and political refugees to Thai women was common. “Siam afforded flexibility to the [Chinese] immigrant,” and “Siamese tolerance” prevailed until the early twentieth century.23 Throughout most of the Qing dynasty there seems to have been an easy flow of Chinese into and out of Siam, without a local effort to assimilate or expel the Chinese immigrants. The twentieth century saw the increasing importance of rigid racial definitions, a discourse probably accelerated by the increasing dominance of Western powers in the region. Emerging ideas of racial and national belonging became stronger than cultural and imperial sources of identity and belonging. Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, and other labels became racial denotations as the foundation of building new nation-states, and they also became powerful tools in division, exclusion, and persecution.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the Chinese in Siam became a scapegoat for the young King Rama VI (1881–1925), who translated the “fashionable European anti-Semitic clichés” into anti-Chinese denouncements in his native country.24 It is not clear whether Lin Wenying or his family were personally affected by Rama VI’s anti-Sinitism, or how prevalent that that attitude was in Thailand. Lin spent much of his adult life traveling between Japan, China, and back to Siam, studying and organizing revolutionary forces. By the time of Rama VI’s reign and the promotion of Siamese/Thai nationalism beginning in 1910, Lin had begun to focus his efforts away from Siam and toward China and his ancestral home in Hainan.
In 1903, at the age of thirty, Lin Wenying had traveled to Tokyo to study politics at Tokyo University of Law and Government. Two years later, in August of 1905, he had joined the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance)—the party often credited as the political center of the anti-Qing revolution—after hearing a speech by Sun Yat-sen, who would later become the first president and civilian leader of the Chinese republican government. After graduating in 1907, Lin returned to Siam, where he became a professional revolutionary, occasionally working closely with Sun when the latter was in Siam. According to one biography of Lin, the closeness of their purpose and their fraternal bond was reflected in the fact that the two “brothers” even shared a bed during their work together when it was necessary for Sun to keep a low profile while in Siam. This account also notes that the bed that they shared is currently housed in a Bangkok museum. Sun’s time spent raising funds and revolutionary fervor is especially remembered in Bangkok’s Chinatown, where the Thai government immortalized him by renaming a street “Soi Sun Yat-sen.”25
Lin Wenying represents the earliest generation of Hainan revolutionaries, and Chinese Communist historians claim him as such in the Communist pantheon although his death predates the founding of the Chinese Communist Party by seven years.26 Lin traveled throughout the region, often with Sun Yat-sen, giving speeches and raising funds for the revolutionaries who fought for the overthrow of Manchu rule and the establishment of a new Chinese republic. Although his revolutionary credo, like Sun’s, did not have a more elaborate platform than this, a Chinese republic that was free of the Manchu yoke was enough of a rallying cry in the Qing dynasty’s final years. In the final decades of the Qing and into the early republic Hainan also produced rebels and secret societies that challenged both the dynasty and the new militarist rulers, but rather than claiming the mantle of these leaders, Hainan’s Communist movement traces its origins beyond the island’s shores, and to civilian men like Lin Wenying. Lin would not meet a peaceful end, but he was not a man of violence. He was most importantly a revolutionary propagandist and fundraiser, and a newspaperman, like some of the other early Hainanese revolutionary leaders.
Following the successful overthrow of the Qing government, Lin and others like him returned from their self-imposed exiles and their international fundraising tours, and rediscovered their homes in China proper. Though Lin had been born in Siam, his Wenchang father had raised him to call China his home country, and it was to Hainan that he returned. But the continuity of leadership that straddled the 1911 divide was not as revolutionary a change as men like Lin had hoped and worked for. Still, some of those allied with the more radical elements of the revolution did return to Hainan, and tried to continue their work of realizing an open and democratic government and society. Like Sun Yat-sen at the national level, the new government gave Lin a post as a leader of the provisional Hainan revolutionary regime; but also like Sun, the civilian Lin was installed and removed by a more powerful military man who was a holdover from the collapsed Qing government. On the national level, it was Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) who quickly pushed Sun aside; on Hainan, it was the Qing military official, Liu Yongdian (1878–1933) who took power from Lin.27
Confronted with this challenge, Lin proved less adept in local politics than he had been in the broad-strokes rhetoric of anti-Manchu revolutionary fundraising. The details of the handover of power between Liu Yongdian and Lin had not been clearly established before Lin returned to Hainan. When Lin arrived in Haikou to take up his position in the new government, Liu did not allow him and the new revolutionary government to move into the seat of power in Hainan. Lin quickly grew frustrated with this lack of cooperation, and instead of returning to Wenchang to wait for Liu’s cooperation, he decided to set up what seems to have been a theatrical temporary headquarters in the market center of Haikou, the district’s capital. This temporary office seems to have been a flamboyant and conspicuous claim to Lin’s right to rule.
Then, in a clumsy attempt to assert his new authority on Hainan, Lin ordered the eviction of fruit and vegetable peddlers from the marketplace that was now his political headquarters. In swift response to Lin’s clearing of the market, the fruit and vegetable sellers rallied together and raided Lin’s “headquarters,” finding Lin himself, and beating him until he sustained serious injuries. Lin’s rival, Liu Yongdian, came to Lin’s aid with an armed guard, but not before Lin’s suspicions had grown about Liu’s involvement in the peddlers’ rioting. The wounded Lin left Hainan, and as he left, he flung accusations at Liu for having riled up the rioters in the market.28 Lin then went on to serve for a short time in the National Assembly in 1912, but with the March 1913 assassination of Song Jiaoren, Yuan Shikai had pushed aside the newly chosen government. The “second revolution” by some of the southern provinces tried and failed to counter Yuan in the summer of 1913, and Lin’s open criticism of Yuan Shikai and his allies put him in danger.29
In 1913, when Sun Yat-sen and many of his supporters had fled to Japan and out of Yuan Shikai’s reach, Lin brashly returned to Hainan. He turned away from direct participation in political life, and established Hainan’s first locally published revolutionary newspaper, the Hainan Daily (Qiongdao ribao), published out of a secret office. In its pages, he continued to spread revolutionary and republican thought, and he openly expressed his ties to, and support for, Sun Yat-sen. It was through Sun’s introduction that Lin connected with a progressive businessman, the powerful Hainanese merchant, Chen Jiafu, who agreed to fund Lin’s new paper.30 It is worth noting that Lin Wenying, who is considered to be Hainan’s first revolutionary, needed the introduction of Sun, a Cantonese, to fund a newspaper on his ancestral home island. In 1913–1914, Sun Yat-sen and other opponents of Yuan Shikai found refuge out of Yuan’s reach, but the political environment of Hainan was more dangerously confined and its leaders even more provincial in their mind-set than those of the mainland. There was no refuge on Hainan, no safe house as in British Hong Kong, Japan, or the foreign concession areas of Shanghai. Lin had personally realized this in the recent market square incident, when he had been punished by the peddlers for misunderstanding local conditions, and drubbed out of the city and off of the island.
But with his newspaper, Lin targeted a more supportive readership with his message of democracy and progressive reform. With Hainan Daily, Lin built up an avid core readership among Hainan’s students and city dwellers. At its height, the paper had a circulation of two thousand, and in its pages, readers could learn of the developments in the world socialist movements as well as the latest in national politics. Even more provocatively, Lin began the deadly work of criticizing Hainan’s local leaders.31
By late 1913, Long Jiguang (1867–1925) and Chen Shihua, had replaced Liu Yongdian in the Hainan and Guangdong leadership. Their poorly concealed involvement in the opium trade was one way that they filled their coffers throughout the region. In late 1913, following an opium purchase in Lin Wenying’s home county of Wenchang, he published an account of the drug traffic through Hainan in his own paper. The article in the Hainan Daily was specific in pointing out the culpability of high Hainan officials in the drug trade. Opium consumption was frequently noted by foreign visitors to the island as one of the most detrimental aspects of Hainan society. Most of these observers were Christian missionaries, and missionaries made opium one of their chief enemies in their Chinese work. Perhaps for this reason, the debilitating effects of opium on Hainan are emphasized in the writings of B.C. Henry and Margaret Monginger, but the drug’s impact on social and financial stability was certainly a scourge, as well as clearly becoming a part of routine corruption in regional politics. Near the end of the Qing, Henry wrote, “The principal important trade is done in opium, which comes in legitimately through the European houses, illegitimately through Chinese under foreign names, and by the usual methods of smuggling. The country is flooded with it, and its baneful effects are seen far and wide. All the officials use the drug, and in some places almost the whole male population is addicted to the opium pipe.”32
Opium had been responsible for so much of the Qing’s weakness, and in his 1913 article, two years after that dynasty’s fall, Lin pointed out that the new leadership was continuing to take part in the trade some believed to have brought the once-great dynasty to its collapse. This would be the final political blow that Lin could strike. Someone tipped off the authorities to the location of his paper’s headquarters. By early spring of 1914, on direct orders from Beijing and Yuan Shikai, Lin Wenying was imprisoned. Lin’s methods in the early republic had been similar to the organizing and writing that he had done abroad in his early revolutionary days. But in the close quarters of Hainan and under a regime that was perhaps even more oppressive than its imperial predecessor, he was not allowed to continue his work. Lin was secretly murdered in prison on the night of April 2, 1914.33 Perhaps the perpetrators feared a public outcry at the trial and execution of Lin, as an increasingly popular figure on the island.
But others followed Lin in writing about the excesses and harsh rule of the Hainan regime, as well as their provincial and national masters in Guangzhou and Beijing, and even writing of socialist developments in Europe and throughout the world. On the mainland, the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s fostered a generation of thinkers and politicians who were driven by nationalism and anti-imperialism, and who worked to eradicate the remnants of traditional China, whether it was the paternalism of Confucius or the absolute power of an emperor. Following Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, national power was greatly weakened, and regions like Guangdong were largely out of the central government’s power. Sun Yat-sen returned from Japan and he cultivated a support base in the south, with the goal of national unification pushed into the future. For his friend, Lin Wenying, Sun arranged for a mausoleum to be built in Wenchang, and he personally inscribed the characters on the placard: “Tomb of Lin Wenying, Revolutionary Martyr.”34 Lin’s death was a loss to the movement for the free voices of Hainan, and it marked a transition in Hainan’s revolution. In the decades that followed, many of the revolutionary leaders on Hainan were local figures with more of an investment in the welfare of the Hainanese people and less of Lin’s early emphasis on international political trends. This did not mean that they were unaware of, or unconcerned with, national and international developments, but rather that local conditions, and the priority of endurance and survival demanded that for many of Hainan’s revolutionaries, the political and military focus shifted to the island’s local struggle.
Prior to Lin Wenying’s death, he and others had advocated for Hainan to be granted provincial status, free of the provincial rule of Guangdong province. Lin and others implored the central government to grant the island increasing autonomy through a national decree that would acknowledge Hainan deserved to take more responsibility for its own fate. Citing previous wise rulers who had granted Hainan such autonomy, Lin and his allies pushed for this cause, referring to the works of Zhang Zhidong and Li Hongzhang in the late Qing, and even referring back to the golden age of the Tang (618–907).35 One significant similarity in all of these late Qing and early republican appeals was that they were directed at the national government and were based not on current conditions, but on historical precedent and potential future developments. By the early 1920s, Hainanese political actors turned their focus away from the national and international stage, and directed their attentions to developments closer to home. The new government seemed to be even more of a disappointment than the previous one. Lin Wenying began this shift with his final newspaper work, but his organizational roots were with Sun Yat-sen and abroad, and the successful implementation of this local work would have to emerge from local Hainanese political actors.
For their part, many merchants protested local leadership when they refused to pay taxes to Hainan’s local warlord, Deng Benyin (1879–?), who had been a military force in the region since early 1921, connected to the southern political and military leader, Chen Jiongming. Deng had been ensconced on Hainan since early 1923. His relations with both Beijing and Guangzhou fluctuated between open hostility and cooperation, amidst the chaotic shifting of the southern warlords and revolutionaries.36 His connections with Chen Jiongming kept him in power until Chen was defeated by Nationalist revolutionary forces in 1925.37 Deng’s politics do not seem to have been as nuanced as Chen Jiongming, whose relationship with the Nationalist and Communist Parties shifted between accommodation and hostility. Deng’s rule frustrated most attempts at local political organization, and while growth for the Communist Party began on the mainland in the early 1920s, on Hainan the CCP was only able to gain a foothold after Deng’s removal in 1925.38
Under the rule of warlords through the 1910s and early 1920s, revolutionary political organization on Hainan that was connected with mainland or national groups was effectively oppressed. Rather than aiming for provincial status, and incorporating Hainan into the national and international world, revolutionaries and reformers on Hainan shifted their focus increasingly to the local political scene. Carrying on Lin Wenying’s legacy of targeting misrule on Hainan through journalism, Xu Chengzhang (1892–1928) attacked the Hainanese and outsiders who governed on behalf of the early republic.
Unlike Lin, Xu was born in Hainan, in northern Qiongshan County. Both of the men were members of the Tongmenghui and both worked to bring about the end of the Qing dynasty. Both Lin and Xu also opposed the national government of Yuan Shikai and those who ruled on his behalf on Hainan. In 1917, Xu enrolled in the Yunnan Military Academy in Kunming, in south-central China. Whereas Lin raised funds in Siam, the home country of his mother and his birthplace, Xu brought Hainanese concerns to Yunnan, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou in his early organizational work. As part of Guangdong Province, Hainan’s provincial affairs were based in Guangzhou, and after his military training, Xu first organized newspaper offices there.39
The New Culture and May Fourth Movements of the late 1910s swept Xu and thousands of others into patriotic activity that opposed foreign imperialism, domestic disunity, and Confucian cultural conservatism. While the May Fourth Movement was defined in large part by its patriotic impetus, notably, the spread of May Fourth ideology on Hainan reflected Hainan’s local character. One Guo Qinguang (1895–1919), a student at Beijing University, was killed following the famous patriotic May Fourth demonstrations in Beijing, dying of his wounds after having been beaten by police. According to the official Communist Party history of Hainan, it was Guo’s death, and not news of the massive protests, that was the most important factor in leading more than one thousand Hainanese students to take to the streets in protest.40 A Hainanese brother had been killed while studying in Beijing, and this roused the Hainanese students to protest, seemingly with more zeal than the original cause of the May Fourth protests, namely the ignominious cession of the German Shandong territories to Japan at the Treaty of Versailles.
Meanwhile, Hainan was also not immune to the high politics of imperialism and diplomacy. Japanese strength was growing, as was apparent from the Shandong cession, and British and French interests, among others, included concerns about Japanese designs on the strategically central island of Hainan, as is apparent from British intelligence reports of the early republican period. Though the British did not control the island directly in any period, they were the main power behind the Imperial Customs, which administered trade in key Chinese ports, including Haikou. By June of 1922, a British naval intelligence officer filed a confidential report to the British Foreign Office, and referred to Hainan, noting that, “it is undesirable that Japan should annex a group of islands on the route between Hong Kong and Singapore and extend her influence to the southwards under the guise of commerce.”41
British interest in Hainan was mainly based on concerns over Japanese development of the island, rather than on Chinese activity on the island. This reflected concerns over Japanese increasing strength, which was also evident in the Washington Conference of 1921–1922, in which the Western Powers tried to hamstring Japanese development, especially in terms of naval strength. This was an ongoing regional focus for both British and French interests in the region, and both powers continued to voice concern over apparent Japanese designs on Hainan until the Japanese occupation actually began in February 1939.42
In the May Fourth era and after, while most of China’s intellectuals were engaging foreign forces either to study Western culture or to challenge Western and Japanese imperialism, on Hainan it was a period of increased isolation even as the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party on the island was laid. Xu Chengzhang’s was to continue the final work of Lin Wenying, and he focused on criticizing the corrupt local leadership. After his military training in Yunnan and newspaper work in Guangzhou, Xu returned to Hainan in 1920, and began plans for a newspaper that would publish progressive and revolutionary articles. The content of the articles included the latest in communist and socialist theories, news of revolutionary movements throughout the world, and also, critiques that were specific to Hainan’s political scene. In this way, the three tiers of international, national, and local politics continued to occupy the revolutionaries of Hainan.
By 1923, Xu had joined the Chinese Communist Party, formed two years earlier in Shanghai, and he began to recruit adherents and to propagate its philosophy of class struggle in his writings. The internationalism of Xu’s generation had changed though. From Lin Wenying’s incorporation of overseas Chinese through the direct funds and cooperation of Southeast Asian Chinese, Xu Chengzhang focused on the ideas of international revolution, but when it came to action, this would be constrained by the island’s shores. His propaganda work in spreading the ideas of Marxism among Hainanese students and intellectuals, and his membership in the Chinese Communist Party make his work the beginning of the official Chinese Communist history on Hainan.43
The inward turn that continued with Xu’s leadership was a pragmatic one, resulting from both local unrest and official attempts to limit contact between radical elements on Hainan and communities abroad; but the revolutionaries also had their own reasons for limiting contact with communities of Hainanese in Southeast Asia and focusing their efforts on their home island. Xu and others had reason to be suspicious of the participation in their movement of their Hainanese comrades in Southeast Asia, many of whom were wealthy merchants and prominent, legitimate members of society in their adopted home countries, and not the natural allies of a Communist revolution.
In 1922, Xu Chengzhang reflected on a year of publishing his paper Hainan Xunbao (Qiongya Xunbao), and he remembered the early struggles of the newspaper’s organizers. (Xunbao, which has no English equivalent, is a term for a paper published every ten days.) In the summer of 1920, there was an attempt to transition the staff of one newspaper (also called Hainan Daily but not the same publication as Lin Wenying’s paper) into the staff of the planned Hainan Xunbao. Some of the staff and contributors were abroad at the time. The funds that they had raised to make this transition and establish the new paper were stolen, possibly by an overseas investor who suddenly withdrew his support and also absconded with the rest of the staff’s funds.44 The theft of these funds represented the weakening of the once strong ties between the Southeast Asian Hainanese and the struggle of the Hainan islanders.
The rhetoric of race noted above might also have soured relations between Siamese (now Thai) hosts of Chinese communities there, but it was economic and class concerns that seem to have caused the erosion of support for Chinese revolutionaries abroad among their fellow overseas Chinese. Many of the prominent Chinese living throughout Southeast Asia were businessmen and merchants, and they might have perceived radical revolutionary politics of organizers like Lin Wenying and Xu Chengzhang as a threat to the stability of the trade networks that supported their businesses. Fundraising for newspapers, guns, and other tools of revolution continued even after the success of the 1911 revolution, as in the case of Xu’s Hainan Xunbao. Eventually, after more than two decades of giving funds to the cause of revolution in China, it is understandable that Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia would grow skeptical and withdraw their support for revolutionaries “whose behavior barely distinguished them from the Qing officials from whom so many emigrant merchants had been glad to escape.”45 The theft of the funds for Xu’s paper was a setback, but only a temporary one, and it moved Xu and others in the Hainan political scene still farther toward the localization of the Hainanese movement. Now this localization was also connected to an economic radicalization that led the Hainanese revolutionaries away from their prosperous cousins in Southeast Asia.
In his April 1922 article, Xu does not write that this theft of his newspaper’s funds led directly to the decision to establish Hainan Xunbao in Haikou, as opposed to in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, or somewhere in Southeast Asia. But the decision to establish the paper’s office in Haikou, he wrote, reflected the shift in making Hainan island more than a symbolic homeland and revolutionary rallying cry.46 Over the next decade, Hainan would become a revolutionary base in its own right, first for the revolutionary forces of the united Nationalist and Communist Parties, and then of the Hainan Communist movement.
Xu acknowledged that most Hainanese were pessimistic about their ability to control their own fate and win the fight for a fair and representative government—one that listened to and responded to the needs of the people who lived on the island. He noted that he had seen the darkest of times, with his newspapers forced to shut; the death of his predecessor, Lin Wenying, murdered in prison without trial; the Hainanese student, Guo Qinguang, killed during the May Fourth protests in Beijing.47 But in 1922, Xu gave his readers cause for optimism. Many of Hainan’s most promising revolutionary leaders were returning to the island and helping to organize the workers in Haikou and the farmers across the island. Like Xu they were publishing their beliefs and distributing them, and a radical movement was gaining momentum.
Xu thus cautiously celebrated the victory of having continuously published Hainan Xunbao for a year. He wrote that the ruler of Hainan, Chen Shihua along with Long Jiguang, had attempted to keep the 4 million Hainanese cut off from the outside world (here, in his population figure, it seems Xu is including both Hainanese abroad and those living on the island, because the island’s population at the time was below 3 million). In this effort to close down free presses, Chen Shihua had bloodied his hands by ordering the murder of Lin Wenying. In shutting down Lin’s Hainan Daily, Chen had deprived the people of Hainan of a “representative organ of public opinion.”48 Xu acknowledged that this was a dark time in the isolation of Hainan at the national and international level, but he urged optimism and local action, for there were those who would not accept this leadership and would continue to fight.
Only a few months after the April 1922 publication of Xu’s article, however, another incident, though it remained largely secret at the time, seems to reflect an even greater degree of Hainan’s isolation, even from Sun Yat-sen’s growing southern revolutionary regime. Sun and his allies were using Hainan as a bargaining chip to secure monetary and military aid for their southern government, according to Japanese newspapers cited in a study of China’s maritime frontiers in the early republic by Ulises Granados.49 If Hainanese political organizers had known that mortgaging the island was in the offing by their Cantonese allies, it surely would have been a disappointing shock. The revolutionaries on Hainan in the 1910s and 1920s continued to be closely connected to Sun Yat-sen and the southern revolutionaries through the early shared work of Sun and Lin Wenying. Xu Chengzhang and others carried on this work. As the southern regime gained strength and support in the early 1920s, these revolutionaries continued to work as Hainanese representatives of Sun’s Nationalist Party, and later as early members of the Chinese Communist Party and allies of the Nationalists. They were dedicated to the anticipated national revolution that would be launched from the south to reunite all of China and drive out the unscrupulous militarists who often seemed to be leashed to foreign interests.
It seems, however, that this Hainanese dedication to Sun’s revolution was not reciprocal, according to the findings of Granados as well as contemporary official British intelligence observers. In June of 1922, while Sun and Chen Jiongming battled for supremacy in the south, Sun fled his offices in Guangzhou (Canton), leaving documents later collected by British foreign service officers. Among these documents was an agreement between Sun’s southern government and the Japan-China Forestry, Mining, and Industrial Society. In a communication from the British consul in Guangzhou to the British embassy in Beijing, the document is fully reproduced. Among the details:
… The President of the Southern Government, Dr. Sun Yat-sen signed this agreement with the representatives of the Japan-China Forestry, Mining and Industrial Society, to help the Southern Government to extend: –
1. The said company agreed to supply the Southern Government with 20,000 latest model rifles, 5,000,000 rounds of ammunition, 72 field guns, 15,000 shells, 120 machine guns and ammunition.
2. The said company agreed to assist the Southern Government with 5,000,000 gold yen.
3. The said company are [sic] prepared to enter into another contract as regards further requirements of funds and arms with the Southern Government.
4. The Southern Government agreed to hand over the development of Hainan Island, all islands on the [Guangdong] coasts to the said company, and also the fishing rights from south of Amoy to Hainan.
5. The Southern Government agreed to give the first call for forestry and mining rights of the province of [Guangxi] to the said company.
6. The said company have the right to develop Hainan and all islands of [Guangdong], but no military or naval constructions may be constructed. The Southern Government have the right to stop any such works and pull them down. … 50
There are thirteen more related conditions listed in the document. The British consul who was responsible for sending this information on to his superior does not qualify his report with the possibility that it is false propaganda of Chen Jiongming’s supporters intended to discredit Sun Yat-sen’s patriotism. Indeed this seems unlikely because it was not broadly publicized, though a French Catholic priest named Savina noted during his 1929 visit to Hainan that he had heard of Sun’s willingness to essentially sell off the island several years earlier. “In short, China has always regarded Hainan as a dumping ground, a discharge outlet [exutoire], a refugium peccatorum [lit., refuge of sinners], and a negligible quantity. A few years ago, the father of the Chinese revolution, Sun Yat-sen, wanted to cede (read sell) Hainan to a foreign power that I could name, for the modest sum of 14 million dollars. It is perhaps because of this that we now see his portrait revered in all the houses of the island!”51
If Savina’s allegation and the document exchanged between Sun’s government and the Japanese company were indeed genuine, they represent Sun’s willingness to completely amputate Hainan’s economic sovereignty in exchange for the weapons and cash that might win some more territory on the mainland. Although this document seems to have remained relatively secret, or at least in the realm of rumor and allegation, it seems that the revolutionary efforts on Hainan were more isolated than ever in the early 1920s, and that their dedication to the southern revolutionaries—indeed evident in Sun’s portrait hung in many of the island’s homes—was not a reciprocal relationship.
Feng Baiju (1903–1973) was born in the northern Hainan village of Changtai, in Qiongshan County. According to biographies of Feng, his father Feng Yunxi, was a prominent local member of one of the most common among the anti-Qing rebellious groups, known as the Triads or the “Three Dots Society” (Sandianhui), which was one name of a wide array of secret societies in the final decades of the dynasty.52 The meaning of the “three dots” of their name, according to some interpretations, reveal how the many antigovernmental and antinorthern movements flowed together among bandits, triads, pirates, and revolutionaries—the dots were a reference to the three strokes written to the left of the Chinese character for the family name of the Taiping rebel leader, Hong Xiuquan (洪秀全 1814–1864).53
During the final years of the Qing’s effective governance, in the late eighteenth century, many of the older secret society organizations had been smashed and scattered, some finding refuge in surrounding areas including Southeast Asia, where they maintained connections to provincial Chinese societies.54 As the Qing state became less efficient in dealing with domestic and foreign challenges, the secret societies were allowed to gain strength, and in the view of one scholar of the organizations, they began to take over those duties of governance that the Qing was no longer able to fulfill. As they gained strength, the secret societies also took on some of the duties once the domain of native-place societies and mutual aid societies, such as organizing overseas communities and coordinating and facilitating migration and settlement by providing housing and what became essentially legitimate organizations.55
This combination of antigovernmental, antinorthern, and anti-Manchu sentiment strengthened the potential foundation of support for the revolutionaries of the south. The slick cosmopolitan merchants and newspapermen who were the brains behind the early revolutionary movement in the last decade of Qing rule were a far cry from the pirates and peasants who supported the Taipings. But the shared opposition to the Manchus was notable, and antinorthern enmity ran deep even among many of the most progressive southern revolutionaries. The sentiments of southern revolutionaries was based on long-standing mutual enmity and rivalry with the north; but in more concrete terms, the outward, international orientation of many southerners and their migration networks were also significant in shaping the generation that would overthrow the Qing.
So in Changtai village, Feng Baiju’s father, Yunxi was a respected member of the community. He had some farmland, and so would be considered a subsistence farmer or peasant in the class distinctions that would become so important in the revolutionary era. But he was also a skilled stonecutter, and his revenue from this work and from his fields allowed him the income to educate his eldest son, Feng Baiju, born June 7, 1903. Little Feng’s given name was Yuqiu, meaning “Abundant World”; and his study name was Jizhou, meaning roughly “Constantly Attentive”; and it was only when he was establishing himself as a revolutionary leader on Hainan as a young man that he took on the name he is known by today, Baiju, meaning “White Colt.”
In 1911 the Qing dynasty crumbled on the mainland into province-sized chunks. In that same year, eight-year-old Feng Baiju (then Yuqiu) began to make the daily trip from Changtai to be tutored in the Chinese classics in neighboring Lingjiao village, about a mile to the northeast. Six years earlier, the imperial examination system had been abolished, and Chinese elites already enjoyed access to a modern curriculum including mathematics, science, foreign languages, and other subjects. And yet, for the son of a stonecutter in a sleepy Hainan village, Feng’s studies began with five years steeped in the Five Classics and Four Books, the Confucian canon that constituted the basis of the imperial examination system from 605 to 1905. For Hainanese, remote as they were from the northern capital of Beijing, success of their native sons on the imperial examination had long been a point of pride. Indeed the Hainanese boast of their intelligent sons with good reason, since their proportion of exam candidates succeeding at the highest level (jinshi, or “presented scholar”) is five times higher than the national per capita average.56
And so Feng Baiju’s family nurtured the old-world hopes that their son would make the most of his classical education and become a great minister, bringing wealth and prestige to the Feng name. Indeed the early republic saw many old Qing officials continuing in their posts and maintaining positions of prominence. But the rising class, as would soon become clear on Hainan, was the military rulers, some of whom had been educated in new military schools or abroad in Japan. By 1916, with the failure of imperial restoration attempts, it was clear to most that the new republic, fragmented as it was, would remain. With the imperial order overthrown and twice rejected in failed restoration attempts, intellectuals like Hu Shih, Chen Duxiu, and others went further and challenged the old order’s underlying philosophy and educational system.
In 1916, these iconoclastic trends had rippled out even to Hainan, and in that year, Feng began an education in the equivalent of a modern junior high and high school. For this he traveled to the market town of Yunlong, about two miles to the north, which meant also two miles to Hainan’s only major city of Haikou. One of Feng’s classmates, Li Aichun (1901–1927), was two years his elder and by all accounts a brilliant student and inspiring presence. Li, Feng, and others formed a student union or “comrades’ mutual aid society” during their time at school in Yunlong. They were steeped in the anti-imperialism of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary thought, including his broad ideas encapsulated in his “Three People’s Principles” (san min zhuyi). These have been translated as nationalism (minzu), democracy (minquan, literally, “people’s power”), and the people’s livelihood (minsheng). Those who see in Sun an ally of the early Chinese Communist Party sometimes choose to translate this last term as “socialism,” because it certainly entailed a degree of economic justice.
In 1920, Li Aichun went on to attend Guangdong Province’s Sixth Teaching College, and then in 1924, Guangdong University (later renamed Sun Yat-sen University) in Guangzhou (Canton). While there, his radical views led him to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1925. The CCP was then only four years old, and membership in the CCP for many members meant that they were also members of the larger Nationalist Party (Guomindang/Kuomintang, KMT). This “bloc within” was an arrangement of the early 1920s that allowed the Communists to operate under the Nationalist umbrella, while the Nationalists enjoyed material and personnel assistance from the Soviet Union and the Comintern. By the spring of 1927 this alliance would collapse in a violent purge, but for Li and Feng, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, the teachings of Sun Yat-sen aligned with their passions and their yearning for revolutionary action.