FROM GLOBETROTTERS TO GUERRILLAS
Hainan’s Early Communists
Feng Baiju (1903–1973) was one of the earliest Hainanese members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). On September 5, 1926, with the introduction of his former Qiongshan classmate, Li Aichun, Feng joined the CCP in Haikou. Li had long been an inspiration to Feng, as the brightest student in his school who had gone on to attend university in Guangzhou (Canton) when Feng was still finishing his studies in the town of Yunlong. As students they had worked together, and Feng had also excelled in his studies in the small Hainan town. The anti-imperialism and nationalism of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 had reached Hainan after German concessions in northern China were to be handed over to the Japanese forces as determined at the Versailles treaty conference. Li and Feng had been imbued with the righteous rage that was expressed in passionate declarations, speeches, essays, and boycotts of Japanese goods, and Li had left for Guangzhou during the high tide of the movement.
While Feng’s family was not wealthy, his family continued to pay his school fees through these years, and Feng remained diligent in his studies through the years to come. He continued to help his father with his stone cutting business, as he had as a small child, and also helped the family during harvests. Every day, as class was dismissed in Yunlong, Feng walked home to Changtai village to help his mother with her work. At school, as he later recalled, he acquired the progressivism of the modern intellectual spirit and at home he lived the life of a peasant son. In these early years, Feng also made the acquaintance of Hainan’s earliest CCP member, Xu Chengzhang.
In 1924 he completed his high school studies and graduated. He returned home to Changtai village, but did not stay long. The example of Li Aichun had lit a fire in him, and he also longed to attend a great university on the mainland, where the intellectual ferment and revolutionary organization seemed to be most urgent. Before he had even submitted an application, Feng was gone, on his way to Nanjing, about halfway up the eastern coast of the mainland. Once there he applied to Southeastern University (Dongnan daxue), but before hearing whether he was accepted, he continued on to Shanghai where he was accepted into Daxia University. He studied for one term there and became politically energized through his involvement in the May 30th Movement in the spring of 1925. The anti-imperialist movement involved a series of protests after British police fired upon an unarmed crowd of Chinese students and workers. The crowd had been protesting a previous killing of a Chinese worker by a Japanese factory supervisor, and this poured fuel on the flames.
Feng was far from home, but he was swept up in the kind of excitement that he had dreamed of as a boy. Throughout the protests, he did not abandon his studies but continued to read and work, steeped in the political climate of 1925 Shanghai. Then, later that year, a letter came from his father, Feng Yunxi.
Dear Jizhou, my son,
Because of difficulties here at home, I must write to you. This past fall and winter, we have lost the income from our rice paddies, the quarry is closed, we have begun to rack up debt, and life is difficult for the entire family. There is truly no way for me to support your continued studies. I hope that once you receive this letter, you will immediately withdraw from school and return home to find another livelihood.
Your father, Feng Yunxi1
Feng did not linger in Shanghai, but began to make his way home almost immediately. Passing through Guangzhou he reconnected with old classmates there, some of whom had joined the CCP. Among them was Li Aichun, who told Feng in a letter that he could best serve the revolution by returning to Hainan and helping to build a Communist organization there. Already on his way home, Feng’s spirits rose as he imagined a revolutionary role on his home island. He had left Shanghai with regret, but a new path had appeared.
On Hainan, and in some Hainanese history books (as in history books of American and other world leaders), Feng Baiju’s path to the leadership of the island’s Communist movement sometimes seems predestined in a way that encourages the historical fallacy of “retrospective determinism” and teleology. In this way, according to the idea developed by the French philosopher, Henri Berson, the history of Communism on Hainan might consist merely of tracing Feng’s path to greatness. Stephen C. Averill rightly counseled China historians to avoid this kind of “star-centered” history, now that local archives have opened to scholars and a vibrant new historiography of alternatives is emerging.2 Indeed, looking closely at the ideological and political conflicts that Averill examines on the mainland in the 1920s and 1930s, it becomes immediately clear that the fate of the CCP was far from predestined to rule China, or even to agree on a unified platform. There were other voices and other views that would shape the Party as much through conflicts and paths not taken as through triumphant unity. On Hainan, one mainlander in particular can be taken as an example of an alternative path that the Communist movement on the island might have taken.
Li Shuoxun (1903–1931) was born in the same year as Feng Baiju, but far away, in landlocked Sichuan in mainland China’s central-western region. His roots were far from the South China Sea and Hainan where he would be killed, aged twenty-eight. As a member of the early Chinese Communist movement, his credentials were impeccable. He had joined the Socialist Youth League in 1921, the year of the CCP founding. He attended Shanghai University and joined the Party in 1924. He was an active student leader in the May 30th Movement in Shanghai in 1925, which connected the anti-imperialism of students and Shanghai factory workers in anti-Japanese and anti-British protests, and in which Feng Baiju was also involved. Li then took part in the Nanchang Uprising of August 1927, the first trial of the fledgling Communist military against their new Nationalist Party enemies. In the following years, young Li held a series of high posts in the CCP leadership of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangdong Provinces. In the summer of 1931 the Party’s leadership sent him to Hainan to help organize the Communists there. Li arrived in Hainan in July of 1931, and the Hainan Party organization seemed to be in disarray. Less than two months later, Li Shuoxun was dead, captured by Nationalist authorities and quickly executed.3
Today, Li Shuoxun is known best as a martyr of the revolution, but also as the father of Li Peng (1928–), who was less than three years old at the time of his father’s death. After Li Shuoxun’s death, Li Peng was adopted and raised in part by Party luminaries, Zhou Enlai and his wife, Deng Yingchao. Like his adoptive father, Li Peng became premier of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Li Shuoxun was a rising star in the CCP in 1931, and like so many revolutionary martyrs, we can only speculate as to where his trajectory might have taken him in the pages of Chinese history. His career was abruptly cut short after he took up his post on Hainan and prepared to lead the Communist movement there. Today, a mighty tomb near Haikou honors Li Shuoxun, and the questions surrounding his death cut to the bone of the problematic Hainan-mainland relationship in the Party’s early years.
Was this simply a question of Hainanese nativist (paiwai) tendencies enduring into the modern era? Had Li’s status as unwelcome mainland advisor been the root cause of his death? Did Hainanese Communists perceive him as a kind of officious revolutionary carpetbagger, arriving from the mainland to dictate policy and teach the islanders how to make revolution? Lin Wenying, Xu Chengzhang, and others had worked to pull Hainan out of what they perceived as its parochial backwardness and into the modern international world. They had hoped to make Hainan a national priority based on its strategic and economic potential. But this attempt to make the island a cosmopolitan and revolutionary center off the southeast coast of the Asian continent was largely unsuccessful.
Li Shuoxun’s death seemed to represent the impossibility of bringing together mainland and Hainanese Communist revolutionary itineraries. In some current accounts of Li Shuoxun’s death, it is noted that he was betrayed by one of his comrades on Hainan. It seems impossible that there is any documentary evidence of this, but today, the placard near his mausoleum implies that a fellow Communist betrayed him to the Nationalist authorities. The genesis of this accusation is not clear, though the swift capture and death of Li following his arrival on Hainan suggests at least that he and his hosts did not take appropriate precautions in getting to a safe location on the island. Based on his long experience with military and political organizations including underground work, it seems unlikely that Li was simply careless. Some Chinese historians imply that Li’s death seemed to be a result of either nativist treachery or the work of resentful local Communist leaders who had heard enough instruction from the mainland and decided to take their fate into their own hands.
If Li Shuoxun was indeed betrayed by local Communist leaders who were resentful of his presence on the island, what greater lessons could we surmise? Was it a victory for small-minded, treacherous, and short-sighted islanders who would wind up with little more than a dozen partisan guerrillas by the mid-1930s, sitting around a campfire somewhere off the map in the island’s interior or huddling in the family home of their leader? Or was Li’s death the inevitable result of a shift in local revolutionary priorities that had moved away from the tactics of conventional positional warfare and ideological orthodoxy; for their own survival, had the local Communists foregone the costly protection of quixotic urban revolutionary organizers like Li Shuoxun? Perhaps there is a middle ground.
Chinese Communist Party members set up a branch in Hainan in June of 1926, nearly five years after the Party was founded in Shanghai. In its early years on the mainland, the Communists and Nationalists were united in fighting southern, and later northern, militarists. After the death of the Nationalist unifier, Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) in March 1925, and then the May 30th Movement only weeks later, political divisions within the Nationalist Party grew significantly. Conservative and radical elements moved apart ideologically, and grew increasingly suspicious of each other’s activities. Less than a year after the 1926 founding of the CCP branch on Hainan, the Nationalist leadership would launch a violent purge of Communists and leftist elements in its midst, first on the mainland, and then on Hainan a few days later.
Thus the 1926 founding of the Hainan Communist movement took place in an extremely tense political moment. The island’s close quarters made this tension an enduring element of the Party’s history for the next twenty-three years. It was from its 1926 founding that the Hainan Party’s slogan would eventually become “for twenty-three years, the red flag never fell.”4 Separation from the Party’s Central command made the Hainanese Communist struggle distinct from the mainland narrative of the revolution that has become part of the national mythology of China. CCP history on the mainland has become known for its iconic episodes like the Nanchang Uprising in August 1927, the Long March from 1934 to 1936, and the Yan’an years spent regrouping in northwestern China.
The earliest developments of the Chinese Communist Party on Hainan were closely connected with the Party on the mainland. The top leaders in the Hainan Party had been studying and working on the mainland and they returned to Hainan to launch the Party at its first representative meeting in Haikou in June 1926. Some of the major figures in the early years of the CCP, like Li Shuoxun, were not Hainanese, but had been posted to the island to begin organization work there. Others, like Xu Chengzhang, introduced in the previous chapter, were Hainan natives but had spent much of their formative careers as organizers and revolutionaries on the mainland or abroad. Xu was the bridge between the new Communist presence on Hainan and the generation of merchants, newspapermen, and aspiring politicians who had tried to incorporate Hainan into the national and international realm of the revolution. This group of early revolutionaries on Hainan definitely saw the island’s political interests as the same as the national priorities of the CCP prior to the Party’s split with the Nationalists in April 1927. In the violence that followed 1927, the Hainan Communist movement turned inward and focused on survival on their home island over all other priorities.
Prior to this inward turn, Xu Chengzhang had worked and given his life to keep the Hainan revolution connected to the mainland Party. Xu had been an excellent student in the final years of the Qing, and had been inspired by the efforts of Lin Wenying to bring about a revolution and a new national consciousness. Lin’s imprisonment and secret execution had proven to Xu that on Hainan the new regime was just as oppressive as the last one. He took part in doomed uprisings against Yuan Shikai and his allies, but the island proved too stifling for his ambition and desire for radical change. Xu left Hainan, and spent his formative years on the mainland, first in a Yunnan military academy, where he experienced the political and cultural upheaval of the May Fourth Movement. Factional fighting throughout the south prevented Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary government from gaining political traction, and in the early 1920s, Xu returned to Hainan to work organizing laborers and publishing newspapers that opposed warlordism, imperialism, and the persistent factionalism in the south. Like Lin Wenying before him, he targeted local figures as well, including the local strongman, Deng Benyin.
By 1925, as southern factional fighting was nearing a frenzy, Xu returned to the mainland and Guangzhou (Canton) where he began work as a drill instructor at the new Nationalist military school, the legendary Whampoa Academy (pinyin, Huangpu). His training in Yunnan and his battlefield experience qualified him to serve as an instructor and he worked closely with the Nationalists in 1925, during the “bloc within” period. This policy stipulated that Communist Party members were permitted and encouraged to also join the Nationalist party, though the CCP was clearly the junior partner within the Nationalist Party. Zhou Enlai also served on the faculty of the Whampoa Academy in this period, and Xu became well acquainted with the man who would become the second most prominent member of Party in the decades to come.5
Most importantly, back on Hainan, the Communists had built support among farmers’ associations. After April 1927, the Hainanese leaders of the Communist Party evacuated the cities and withdrew to their rural support base. In the main history of the CCP, April 12, 1927, is remembered as the day that started the “White Terror,” which led to summary imprisonment and execution of Communists and leftists, beginning in Shanghai. In Haikou, April 22 (a day many Hainanese refer to as “Four-Two-Two,” and not “Four-One-Two” as mainlanders refer to the events) is the day remembered as the betrayal of the Communists by their erstwhile Nationalist allies. Hours before the Nationalists raided the headquarters and homes of Communists and their sympathizers, the Party’s local secretary, Wang Wenming (1894–1930), received a message that warned all Communist operatives to leave the cities.6 The weeks that followed were obviously chaotic. Less than one year earlier, the founding Party Representative Assembly in June of 1926 had established the CCP’s official presence on Hainan, representing 240 Hainanese members.7 Though the Party had grown in that year, its members that were not captured or killed were scattered throughout the countryside.
On the mainland, there were still enough leftists and Communists to give the Party a coherent platform and leadership. More importantly, once the dust of the White Terror had settled, the Communist leadership on the mainland courted and won important allies, especially in the military. By August 1, they had launched a civil war on their own terms with the Nanchang Uprising. On Hainan, and in other provincial CCP branches, the way forward was not as clear. Consolidation of the Hainan Communist Party was one option, for the wide-reaching activities of the Party that had developed under the umbrella of the Nationalist Party seemed to no longer be sustainable. But the question of what losses should be cut remained unclear. For several months after the April 1927 purge and executions, the Communist Party leadership remained on the run and hidden among their rural supporters.
Again, Hainan’s island geography influenced the nature of the choices for the Communist movement there. The limits of the surrounding seas prevented the Party leaders from moving into the neighboring province, or the provincial borderlands, and rallying their forces there. A leadership meeting was arranged in June in Lehui, near the central eastern coast, and the Hainanese Party members Wang Wenming and Yang Shanji were elected to lead. Their decision was to move immediately in counterattack, and to expand the Party, to seek new recruits and supporters across the island, rather than consolidating their loyal adherents and taking stock of their losses. In the case of the Communist leader, Feng Baiju, it was his family’s local prominence, their education, and their capacity to lead that won them support. Feng returned to Changtai village and established contact with his friend and comrade, Wang Wenming. Both of them had narrowly escaped capture and certain execution in Haikou.8
The results were surprisingly quite successful, and in six months, Party membership had swelled to fifteen thousand on Hainan.9 Military forces sprang up in the form of local militias, armed farmers, and regular forces. Some of Hainan’s Communist leaders returned to their hometowns where they were able to rally forces. By August 1927, at the same time as the mainland Communists launched their Nanchang Uprising, the separate Communist forces across Hainan, along with their partisan supporters, were sufficiently strong to launch pitched battles with the Nationalists and their own adherent militias.
One noted battle in September revealed both the strength and the inexperience of the Communist forces on Hainan. The battle of the Coconut Stockades (Yezi sai), south of Jiaji on the island’s central eastern coast involved hundreds of Communist forces, and some of the notable leaders, including Wang Wenming and Yang Shanji.10 On September 23, 1927, the Communist forces stormed the stockades and routed the Nationalists, sending them into retreat. Following this speedy victory, the main part of the Communist forces withdrew, leaving a small force to mop up the straggling Nationalists. Among those who stayed was Yang Shanji, and when the Nationalists regrouped and counterattacked, he was killed along with the small force that was left to hold the stockade.11 To many, this was a cautionary lesson against positional warfare waged by inexperienced forces. The coming year, however, would see the catastrophic results of the Communists’ attempt to take Hainan’s urban centers and wage positional warfare across the island. But before this destructive strategy was fully implemented, the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1928 saw a period of explosive growth for the Hainan Communists and their support base.
By January of 1928, the leadership of the Hainan Communist Party filed six reports to the CCP Provincial Committee of Guangdong, explaining their current situation. The sixth is extant, and it explains that they had recently sent one Feng Zenghua with the fifth report several days earlier, hoping that it had arrived safely. The sixth report reflects uneven stability across the Hainanese Communist movement.12 The report cites Communist strength around the cities of Fucheng, Haikou, and Jiaji, and generally in the north of the island. The Communist strength in these cities resulted from the support of workers’ movements there.
Lingshui, in the far south, was an early soviet base of the Communist movement on Hainan, and the report notes that things had settled enough for the soviet government there to begin combing through its ranks and counterpurging reactionary elements. Yaxian, neighboring Lingshui, was also strongly consolidated, and the report confidently relates that they could be on the verge of overthrowing the Nationalist authorities there, as they had in the Lingshui region. In most other regions, the report lists a series of military struggles that are either in progress, or on the verge of breaking out. But this unrest is not strictly credited to the Hainan Communist leadership and those who are writing this report. Further, it is likely that reports of progress were exaggerated for propaganda purposes, and while the documents reflect early ambitions, they must be read with skepticism.
As in the reference to the workers’ unrest in the northern cities and the peasants’ unrest in the south, the report does not claim that these are regular Communist fighters who might respond to the leadership of those who are writing the report. The tone of the report is both optimistic and chaotic, almost giddy. The unrest was positive as long as it was directed at the Nationalist regime, who no longer shared the burden of power with the Communists they had just purged. The violence of the purge had further alienated the Nationalist leadership from the workers and peasants of Hainan, although it may have temporarily strengthened their position as rulers of Hainan and China.13
By June of 1928, however, the optimism of the January report had faded. This change of tone came as a result of the first Nationalist extermination campaigns launched against Communist military and political organizations on Hainan. In March of 1928, the Nationalist 10th division of the 11th army arrived on Hainan from Guangdong under the proven leadership of their commanding officer, Cai Tingkai (1892–1968). Cai (also rendered as Ts’ai T’ing-k’ai) had earned a national reputation in Shanghai in 1931, resisting a short-lived Japanese offensive there. Cai’s 10th division was more than four thousand men, and it far outnumbered the entire Communist fighting force, which was just over fourteen hundred in early 1928.14 Nine trying years later, the Hainan Communist leadership remembered this as the end of one of their ebullient high tides, as they were “smashed to pieces” (da de qilingbaluo) by the better trained, better supplied, and better led Nationalist forces.15 At this early stage, losing contact with the mainland Communist authorities, particularly the Guangdong Provincial and Southern Regional Bureaus, was seen as a major challenge to the Hainan Communists’ ability to operate and grow. Still, a few communications remain extant from this period.
A report was filed in June from the northern city of Haikou, the island’s governmental center and the founding site of the Hainan Communist movement.16 This report begins with a complaint that the writers, who call themselves the Haikou Military Committee, have not received a response from their Guangdong provincial leadership, their “elder brothers,” in more than a month. They diligently sent weekly reports on their progress, but have received no instructions in response, and it is not clear if this is a result of difficult or dangerous communication channels, or apathy on the part of the Guangdong leadership. The implicit criticism leveled at the Guangdong leadership may have been a swipe at the newest leader of the Hainan Communist movement, Huang Xuezeng (1900–1929), a mainlander fresh from the Guangdong Provincial Committee CCP headquarters who was on his way to Haikou.
According to the June 1928 report, the Haikou Military Committee had ordered Party members underground, and to temporarily cease any expression of revolutionary views. This was meant to protect those of their supporters who were prominent members of the overseas Hainanese community or schoolteachers, but it was possibly a countermeasure in anticipation of the brash urban strategy orders that Huang was bringing from the mainland. Still, the committee reported that it was making progress with an increasingly disaffected workforce, among which was a wave of unemployed laborers migrating to Hainan from the mainland. In the Committee’s report on the activities of the enemy, they note that the Nationalist authorities had established wireless radio contact with Nanjing, the new national capital and center of the Nationalist republican government. The only note of optimism in the Committee’s report on the Nationalist activities was that they were possibly moving a military division off the island and to the north, and thus loosening what seemed to be a stranglehold on the Communist activities on Hainan.
In the Committee’s self-appraisal, they were blunt in relating their own recent difficulties. “At the moment, the Military Committee is responsible for five persons. In the previous meeting we decided to leave three members operating in Haikou, assigning others to work as appropriate. (Due to financial constraints, we are unable to communicate with [and report the progress of] all other cities and counties.)”17 The reports of fighting in southern Lingshui had made their way north to Haikou, and the Military Committee reported this, in sketchy detail: a hundred or so of the Communist organized peasant soldiers had routed four hundred or so government troops, but with no information on casualties or territory held. There was also fighting in Qiongdong, and the report refers to another account of that, without providing detail here. In Wenchang and Qiongshan, however, the report cites the terrible impact on the Communist organization in these regions following the “White Terror” of the previous year, concluding that little information was available from these regions and any kind of organizational work there was not feasible at this time.
The weakness and scattered nature of the Communist organizational structure on Hainan is also evident to the Military Committee in the recent upsurge in reactionary militias within various townships across the island. (The report notes the arrival of weapons from Guangdong as the only bright spot in military developments.) It is not clear whether the reactionary militias the report is referring to are militias that are supportive of the Nationalists against the Communists, or if they are essentially loosely organized bandits who were not cooperating with the Communists. But in either case, they presented a turn for the worse in the Hainan Communists’ fortunes after the relatively positive developments of the previous years in growing Communist support in militias and peasant organizations across the island. Compared to the report of only six months earlier, this June 1928 account of Communist activity on Hainan is much less optimistic. The report even gives vent to some of the frustrations of the Haikou Military Committee when it doggedly explains the failures, referring to other reports that should have been answered by the Guangdong Provincial Committee but apparently were not, and finally ends with an exasperated exclamation to the Provincial Committee to please reply with instructions for moving forward.18 Also at the time of the June 1928 report, the Military Committee officially put forward the local Hainan leader, Wang Wenming as its leader and secretary. Within the month, Huang Xuezeng’s arrival as emissary of the Guangdong provincial Communist authorities meant that Wang would be replaced. There are few documents extant from the Hainan group in this time, and none of them express any protest of Wang’s replacement by the newly arrived Huang, but the change of strategy that Huang brought with him—to return to an urban strategy—must have been received with some skepticism by the battered Hainan cohort.
If the earlier June 1928 report conveyed any coherent message about the Communist movement on Hainan, it was that any attempt to hold the island’s cities and towns was impossible under the current conditions. Still, with Huang Xuezeng’s arrival, a renewed urban strategy was attempted, and the Guangdong native urged coalescence of the Communist forces on the island and general assaults on the cities, beginning with the capital of Haikou. Huang reported these plans to the Guangdong Provincial Committee immediately after his arrival in Hainan in July of 1928, most likely as a demonstration that he was attempting to implement the marching orders he had been given for the island.19 These orders came, in turn, from the Shanghai Party center that was also reluctant to fully abandon the urban strategy.
Wang Wenming and others in the Hainan command took a secondary role in the following year, but Huang had little success in his attempts to retake the urban centers, especially the northern Haikou where he concentrated his efforts. With Cai Tingkai and the Nationalist forces’ arrival from Guangdong in the spring of 1928, Huang’s urban strategy was especially destructive. In pitched battle, the partisans and militias under Communist leadership had little hope of holding their own villages and towns, let alone trying to take the island’s urban centers.20 Almost exactly a year after Huang Xuezeng’s arrival on Hainan, he was dead, captured and executed by the Nationalists in Haikou in July of 1929. The official Party history declares that Huang was betrayed to the Nationalist authorities, and his death led to the collapse of the urban workers’ movement on Hainan.21 Judging from the 1928 reports from the Haikou Military Commission and the arrival of Nationalist forces under Cai Tingkai’s leadership, it seems the urban movement had already crumbled at least a year before Huang’s death, and that the twenty-nine-year-old Guangdong native’s life had been lost in a lost cause.
In September of 1929, another report was written and submitted to the Central Party leadership by Luo Wenyan (1904–1961), a Wenchang native and early member of the CCP.22 Luo had joined the CCP in 1924, and he was a leader in the Hainan Party since its founding in June of 1926.23 Luo’s report notes similar problems to the 1928 report, and also the new problem of infighting within the Hainan Communist leadership. The violence of 1927 and 1928 led to a scrambling chaos among the Hainan Communist leadership, according to Luo, further complicated by conflicting views between the urban and rural strategies of different leaders. Some promising leaders sought refuge in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Southeast Asia. Among those who remained, all of the leaders thought of themselves as “great men,” and entitled to lead the Party.24
Luo’s bitterness reflected the conflict and struggles for power that were underway among the mainland as well as the Hainan Communist leadership. In this dark period, frustrations within the Party were manifested both on Hainan and on the mainland. Betrayal became a political tactic amongst rivals within the Communist Party, with Nationalist executioners ever ready to oblige and clean up the mess. This is not a fondly remembered chapter in national history, but as in any underground movement or civil war, it was a constant danger.
The early 1930s were trying years for the Communists of Hainan, as they were for the Communists on the mainland. The Communist movement was all but snuffed out by the arrests, executions, and battles with the Nationalists. On the mainland, the Communists were able to find some degree of safety and civilian support in the border regions between provinces, the traditional refuge of bandits. And finally when the Nationalist military offensives threatened to completely wipe out the Communists on the mainland, they were able to escape the encirclement and make their way through the western frontier and beyond the reach of Chiang Kai-shek. There was no chance for a Long March on Hainan, of course, bounded as they were by the ocean. Instead of borderlands and frontiers, there was the ocean and emigration on a junk or raft, or retreat into the island’s unknown mountainous forests and jungles.
The Long March brought the Communists of the mainland to the fabled caves of Yan’an, and those who had made the trek were now fiercely loyal to the cause, though nearly nine in ten marchers did not reach this destination. On Hainan, according to most accounts, the common or unchanging theoretical or political foundation of Communism in the early 1930s is only the finest of threads. There were times when the main force of the Communists of Hainan could gather around a single fire in the wilderness, listening to Feng Baiju tell stories and his wife sing arias from Hainan operas.25
Following on the work of Lin Wenying and Xu Chengzhang, the Hainan Communists increasingly took on the local priorities of the island. For the guerrillas, the first priority was survival. From the cosmopolitan newspapermen and Tongmenghui members, through the united front with the Nationalists, the Hainan Communists had been an urban group that moved easily between the mainland cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. On Hainan, the split with the Nationalists left the Communist leadership with almost nowhere to run. No foreign concessions, no far-flung frontiers, no bandit lairs. The result, for the Hainan Communists, was devastating. Of the eleven main founders of the Communist movement on Hainan in 1926, seven were dead at the end of 1929, and four more were dead by 1932, all but one of them killed in battle or executed. One of them lived past the age of forty.26
Following the death of Huang Xuezeng, there was nothing holding the Hainan Communists in the cities, and Wang Wenming shifted the political center to the rural, mountainous Muruishan soviet. This period saw continued growth of the Party, and relative calm. In October of 1929, the Hainan Communist Special Committee filed a report on their recent conference in Neidongshan, near the site of their inaugural battle at the Coconut Stockades.27 The report was a sober and measured reflection on the disastrous and formative years that had just passed. The urban strategy, which would still hold some sway on the mainland for several years, was completely discredited, and the prospect of positional warfare was likewise blamed for much of the failure. The sacrifices had been great, and as Wang Wenming resumed the Hainan Communist leadership, he led the Party center to the mountains. Smaller bases here had met with greater success in repelling Nationalist assaults earlier in 1929, punishing enemy attempts to eliminate their bases there.28
Reviewing the original ranks of the leadership of the later 1920s, Wang Wenming was one of the few leaders who had survived Nationalist purges and battles until that point. But by late 1929, Wang had become very sick. Among his final decisions were two crucial ones that would shape the Hainan Communist movement for the following two decades. First, he designated Feng Baiju as the movement’s next leader, and second, he determined that the urban strategy must be abandoned, and the Party should seek refuge, rehabilitation, and reorganization in rural base areas.
By May of 1930, the first stage of this consolidation effort was complete and the Hainan Communists were back on the attack, launching the “Red May” offensive across the eastern coast. At the end of the year, military and political success had rebuilt the Red Army on the island, and its ranks swelled to thirteen hundred fighting men and women. This was a major increase from the fighting force of about five hundred that had remained in the Muruishan base area after the assaults by Cai Tingkai’s Nationalist fighters in the early days of 1930.29 One portion of these forces established in Hainan’s Lehui County in this period was a unit of women fighters, formed by the Hainan Communist leadership. The leadership formed the group to establish a framework for women to contribute to the revolutionary effort in a more substantial way than they had until that point. According to some accounts, as many as seven hundred women volunteered to join the all-female fighting force. Ultimately, on May 1, 1931, 103 women would form the Women’s Special Services Company of the Hainan Independent Second Division of the Chinese Red Army. This company would later become immortalized in films and ballets as the “Red Detachment of Women,” and they would stand in for most mainlanders’ understanding of the Hainan Communist movement. During the Cultural Revolution, even U.S. President Richard Nixon would be treated to a viewing of the ballet based loosely on the “Red Detachment.” The artists responsible for the numerous dramatic endeavors related to this group took many liberties. Surprisingly, the artists disregarded the most obvious dimension of triumphant feminism within the historical reality of this group, which was that the group consisted both of women fighters and women officers. The company’s real authority figure was Feng Zengmin (1912–1971), and a photograph of her with filmmaker, Xie Jin, confirms that the two at least met, and yet amazingly, the commander of the company in the film and ballet versions is a man.30
The growth in Communist numbers gained the attention of Nationalists on the mainland, who sent Chen Hanguang to lead the encirclement and annihilation campaigns on the island. Chen was far more efficient than his mainland counterparts in Jiangxi, and by 1932, the Hainan Communist movement was again battered and reduced to only a handful of adherents.31
The rule of Chen Jitang in Guangdong (1931–1936) saw an increase in the province’s autonomy from the Nanjing government. With the help of General Chen Hanguang, Chen Jitang almost completely wiped out the Communist presence on Hainan. But other than anti-Communism, Chen did not share many of Chiang Kai-shek’s political views for China’s future. The rift between Chen Jitang and Chiang Kai-shek would develop into open conflict, but in the early 1930s, Chen’s rule in Guangdong and on Hainan was effective in containing the Communists’ development there. Communist base areas saw their fluctuating fortunes take another turn for the worse after 1931, and the next five years would nearly see the complete annihilation of the Hainan Communist movement. The ties between the mainland Communist movement and the Hainan Communists were tenuously maintained through much of this period, but the small nucleus that remained of the Hainan movement was learning to function without the material assistance of the mainlanders. Rather than broadening their channels of support and communication from the mainland, the Hainan Communists turned inward once more to an alliance with indigenous Li people of the island’s interior. More precisely, the Li and the Communist leadership found a shared cause of resisting the Japanese, and even more immediately, fighting the Nationalists.
Of course, on the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nanjing government was also attempting to eradicate the Communists, and by the end of 1934, they had nearly succeeded after a change in tactics that saw the main Communist base areas ominously surrounded. After a series of annihilation campaigns, the Nationalists succeeded in driving the main Communist force out of central and southern China, and on the Long March. This Communist defeat and retreat has been celebrated as a triumphant crucible of the Party, but had it not been for the imminent Japanese invasion, it seems likely that this would have been the end of the Chinese Communists. The Long March of 1934–1936 led the Communists to the caves of Yan’an in China’s remote northwestern region.
These efforts at domestic repression of the Communists—both by Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists on the mainland and by Chen Jitang in Guangdong and on Hainan—while effective, also served to sap some of the leaders’ popularity among the country’s patriotic students, merchants, and increasingly broader portions of the population. Another greater threat was looming. In September of 1931 the Japanese military had begun to seize portions of northeastern China, and a stream of Japanese colonists followed. In January of 1932, bombing and fighting broke out in the “Paris of the Orient,” Shanghai, as Japanese designs on greater China became more and more obvious. By 1935, an anti-Japanese movement had spread and perhaps by default, the Communists earned windfall support as the Nationalists continued to focus on repressing the Communist movement instead of confronting the Japanese threat. In late 1936, amid an international scandal, Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped and forced to stop campaigns against the Communists by one of his most loyal generals. Locked in a tense alliance, the Communists and Nationalists faced the full-scale Japanese invasion in the following year. While Taiwan had been secured as a Japanese colony in 1895, in the 1930s it was far from clear where Hainan would figure in the emerging titanic struggle that would envelope the forces of China, the United States, Great Britain, France, and of course the Japanese empire, among other regional forces.
In September 1937, with Feng Baiju as the clear leader of the Communist Party on Hainan, he and his wife, Zeng Huiyu, were captured by Nationalist forces and detained until November. While in prison, Feng was interrogated but repeatedly reminded his captors that they had no cause to hold him or interrogate him, since their two parties were in alliance.
Feng’s captivity was the subject of another interrogation, this one coming in the late 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution when his interrogators implied that he had struck a secret deal with the Nationalists. Indeed, as noted, there was no need for any secret agreement, since the two parties were already in alliance. Imprisoned for years during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, Feng acknowledged only one mistake during his prison stay. When asked about his views of Sun Yat-sen, whom both parties view as their political forbear, Feng acknowledged the correctness of Sun’s “Three People’s Principles” of nationalism, socialism, and democracy, and affirmed his “lifelong commitment to struggle” for these teachings.
But in this, Feng was walking the narrow tightrope of the united front. His Red Guard persecutors thirty years later were aware of this overzealous statement of loyalty to Sun Yat-sen whose legacy was one of moderation and conciliation between the two parties. Feng had pledged his “lifelong” (zhongsheng) support for Sun’s ideals, and he knew that this was overstepping the invisible lines that still existed between the parties. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards’ used this as irrefutable proof of his capitulation to the Nationalists. Feng responded that they only had this proof of his commitment to Sun Yat-sen because Feng himself had submitted a report to the party headquarters in Guangzhou immediately upon his release, already pointing out at that time his own mistaken statement about “lifelong” support for Sun’s principles. He requested and received clarification of party policy regarding the united front.
But Feng’s release was not a foregone conclusion in September of 1937. Hundreds of Communist cadres of even higher rank had died on the execution grounds of Hainan in the past ten years, and Feng believed that he might be another one of them. Of the top leaders of the Hainan movement, Feng was one of the only ones remaining alive after a decade of devastating struggle. As he sat in prison, separated from his wife, he tried to reason with his captors and contemplated the fate of the revolution, wondering if he would be a part of its future.
Following the deaths of Huang Xuezeng then Li Shuoxun, and the rise of Wang Wenming followed by Feng Baiju, the local turn of the Hainan Communist movement was perhaps irreversible. Though the goal of national victory in the Chinese Communist revolution was shared by the Hainan Communists, Hainan’s path would be a lonely one, with little communication and less assistance from the mainland. After the deaths of Huang and Li, Party Central on the mainland only sent cadres like Long March veterans, Zhuang Tian and Li Zhenya, the former a native son of Hainan and the latter deeply familiar with the island, to propagate mainland policy and take part in the island’s Communist movement. As for the international dimension of the Hainan Communist movement, that, too, would take on a new form in which Hainanese abroad returned to the island to join the Communist movement, but fewer and fewer islanders looked outward to flee or seek assistance in Southeast Asia. The Japanese invasion of Hainan in 1939 would shape the next phase in the continuing localization of the Communist movement, which would see six years of grinding conflict and isolation from the mainland command, as well as an alliance with the indigenous Li people of Hainan’s interior forested mountains.32