AN OUTRAGE OF LITTLE CONSEQUENCE
The Japanese Invasion and Occupation of Hainan
On February 10, 1939, forces of the Imperial Japanese South China Naval Fleet, also known as the Fifth Fleet, landed along the northern coast of Hainan with army support, and overran the island in a matter of days. The immediate diplomatic explanation that the Japanese government provided was that the action was carried out with the goal of exterminating the Chinese military presence on Hainan.1 This began over six years of Japanese occupation of the island. Two days after the beginning of the landing on Hainan, a group of foreign journalists asked the Nationalist leader and ruler of China, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) about its implications. Chiang’s response was perhaps paradoxical and contradictory, not unlike the nature of Hainan’s historical relationship with the Chinese mainland. Addressing a question about the influence of the Japanese action on peace in the region, Chiang said, “The attempt of the Japanese to occupy Hainan Island on February 10 is similar to their occupation of Mukden on September 18, 1931. In other words, by attacking the Island Japan has committed another Mukden outrage in the Pacific. The effect of this is the same irrespective of the fact that one outrage was committed on land and the other on the sea.”2
Chiang’s comparison seemed to have dire implications, but it was also perhaps a performance for an international audience. The Mukden (Shenyang) Incident of 1931 had been unheeded as a prelude to wider Japanese aggression, and it came about six years before the full-scale invasion of China. Chiang reminded his listeners that the failure in 1931 of foreign powers to realize the extent of Japanese territorial ambition had allowed Japanese expansion and aggrandizement to its current extent. With relatively little European and American attention in the Pacific theater still in 1939, Chiang was using the example of Hainan to echo this earlier missed opportunity to check Japanese expansion, and to encourage a more muscular confrontation of the current Japanese threat. Chiang was comparing the Japanese landing on Hainan to the infamous September 18, 1931, Mukden incident in Manchuria, clearly in an attempt to sound an alarm that had not been heard the first time.
The Hainan landing was part of a grand triangular plan, said Chiang, for Japan to control the Pacific between Guam in the ocean’s east, Sakhalin in the north, and Hainan in the west. If the Japanese accomplished this aim, Chiang warned that any action by the French, British, or Americans in the region would be rendered impossible by the resulting Japanese naval strength. This was indeed a grand framework in which to characterize the Japanese occupation of Hainan. In terms of the failed defense of Hainan, the lack of Chinese naval force and organized beach positions had prevented any substantial protection of the island’s coastline. The Japanese occupation of the island already seemed to be a foregone conclusion by February 12, 1939, only two days after the initial action.
It is almost impossible to imagine a grander way to cast the events of February 1939 than by linking the Japanese landing on Hainan to a total Pacific strategy, and comparing the event to the infamous Mukden Incident. But significantly in the final question of the interview, a journalist asked Chiang about how great an effect the Japanese landing would ultimately have on the Chinese-Japanese hostilities. Chiang responded flatly, “Very little. The issue between China and Japan will be fought out on the mainland. The occupation of one island is not of serious consequence to us.”3 The Japanese seizure of Hainan, ever the island of paradox in the eyes of the mainland, was both “another Mukden outrage” and, at the same time, “not of serious consequence to us.”
More than a year and a half passed from the July 7, 1937, outbreak of full-scale war with Japan until the Japanese invasion of Hainan in February of 1939. Several events on Hainan in that eighteen-month interim reflect the degree of autonomy of both the governing authorities and the Communist movement there. Ever since the beginning of the decade, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nanjing government had been unable to realize broad national unity. Regional militarists blocked these attempts, reluctant to surrender their autonomy, or to commit their troops to aiding in conflicts in distant parts of the fragile republic. As the Japanese encroachment in Manchuria increased, and incidents between Chinese and Japanese troops in the northeast became more frequent, some became frustrated with the Nanjing government’s reluctance to confront Japan. On December 9, 1935, student-led protests erupted in the streets of Beiping (Beijing), giving a public voice to the calls on the Nanjing government to take a stronger stand against Japan, and stop the piecemeal concessions that were being surrendered in the northeast. The students clashed with police, and they received support around the country. Chiang Kai-shek was vulnerable to criticism that he was more concerned with internal pacification than resistance of the Japanese threat. While this broad statement reflected reality to an extent, recent mainstream scholarship has also urged a reconsideration of the Nanjing-Chongqing Nationalist regime and its challenges and endurance in the face of impossible adversity during the 1930s.4
In the summer of 1936, southern leaders including Chen Jitang moved again to assert their autonomy from Nanjing. In 1931, it was Japanese action in the northeast that had brought the southern militarists and the Nanjing regime back together when the southerners had been on the verge of open war with Nanjing; but by 1936, so profoundly had the political landscape changed, that the southerners were able to now use the Japanese threat as part of the reason not for closing ranks, but instead for escalating their opposition to Nanjing. In May of 1936, a succession crisis had followed the death of one of the prominent southern leaders, Hu Hanmin, and in the confusion, other southerners from the “New Guangxi Clique” moved to capitalize on both defending their autonomy and attacking Chiang’s reluctance to confront the Japanese threat. The plan quickly backfired, and massive defections within the southern military gave Chiang an easy victory in reasserting his control over the south.5
The divisions within the Nationalist regime, and among its regional leaders seemed to present a possible weakness to be exploited by the Communists, and perhaps the most spectacular example came with the detention of Chiang Kai-shek in December of 1936 by Zhang Xueliang, one of his top generals who had been the most powerful figure in Manchuria. Zhang demanded that Chiang cease his attempt to eradicate the Chinese Communists, and instead turn to face the Japanese threat. After all it was Zhang’s Manchuria that had already been turned into a Japanese puppet state, and it had been his troops that Chiang ordered to strike a final blow against the Communists in Yan’an. The detention, or kidnapping, became world headlines, and Chiang was finally released with the understanding that a Chinese united front would face the Japanese threat together.
But the alliance was an uneasy one, and both parties soon retreated to separate inland corners of China proper. The Communists’ central authority was based in northwestern Yan’an, and the Nationalists as leaders of the internationally recognized Chinese government retreated to western Chongqing (Chungking), following the long-awaited Japanese invasion of the coast in 1937–1938. Among the leadership of both parties, there was disagreement as to how committed they should be to this united front, and the party line shifted occasionally in both camps. The last alliance between the two parties had been shattered by the violence of 1927. In 1937, with the Japanese invasion, alliance was crucial, but both parties included a spectrum of opinion on the degree of investment in the alliance, and the degree to which they hedged their bets. Whereas one leader may declare enthusiastically that he believed in “total commitment to the united front,” another within the same camp might privately or openly criticize the alliance as shortsighted and foolish, since, in his view, one party was simply waiting for the right moment to annihilate the other. Wariness and mistrust was common among both parties, as well as frustration that the other was not fully committed to resisting the Japanese invasion.
From the perspective of Hainanese leaders, it was sometimes difficult to keep abreast of the latest parsing on the mainland by the two parties, who seemed to be quibbling over troop commitments, uniform insignia, military unit titles, and command appointments. Mutual mistrust continued after December 1936, while military and political leaders sometimes improvised as to how they should respond to local conditions that brought up questions of the degree to which they should obey or disobey a command from one of the two parties. Differing political and military directives from the two parties eventually led to conflict, leaving field commanders in increasingly dangerous situations. The quibbling of political leaders in Party headquarters would lead to confusion and sometimes disaster, especially far from Yan’an and Chongqing, in areas like south China, including Hainan.6
Between the July 1937 beginning of full-scale war on the mainland, and the February 1939 landing of Japanese forces on Hainan, interaction between the Nationalists and Communists on the island was tense. Foreign observers noted the bandit-like violence of the “Reds” as well as the heavy-handed suppression campaigns launched by the Nationalists. The American Presbyterian Reverend David Stanton Tappan II (1880–1968) was one of the most prominent foreign figures on Hainan from the 1920s through the end of the 1940s. Tappan and other Americans on Hainan maintained official relations with the Nationalist authorities, and then later with the Japanese occupiers until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, but they expressed little sympathy for the island’s other aspiring rulers, the Communists. In their letters and diaries from this period, the American mission community referred to the misguided and godless Reds as little more than bandits. Vulnerable as the mission community was, often located in the island’s smaller towns, their fears of bandits were not baseless. One Reverend Byers was killed in a botched attempt to kidnap and ransom him by a group of brigands in 1925.7
And so, considering this aversion to sympathy with the Communists, one example of Reverend Tappan’s writing on the subject is striking. He wrote the following in the Hainan Newsletter of the American Presbyterian Mission, after observing a group of suspected Communists captured by the Nationalists near Jiaji (Kacheck) in 1937:
During a Sunday morning service came the notes of the bugle that strike terror to one’s heart for they mean an execution. Shortly out of the military headquarters across from the church came four or five soldiers pushing three women and three men with shackled feet and hands tied behind their backs.
The procession with a quickly gathering crowd marched through the long wide streets of the market and back past the church. Then out beyond to the execution field where these six young people were shot for attending a Communist meeting.
Supposedly the authorities feel that is one way of keeping people from being Communists. But that was not this writer’s reaction as he saw a twenty year old girl being pushed along to her execution with hundreds of men, women and children following. I thought of one such misguided girl who, when she was being taken to her execution, turned to the crowd and cried,
“I am dying for my faith! What are you doing for yours?”
In other parts of China they have a better way of putting such young offenders, misguided youth, in prison schools where they are shown their mistakes and their visionary ideals are directed in more constructive channels.8
I include this entire passage from Tappan’s writing to capture the ambivalence felt by an observer of the ongoing Chinese civil war in 1937, as it unfolded on Hainan. The title of Tappan’s piece quoted above is “Communist Echoes: Dreaded Reds Still Taking Their Toll,” and it seems, more than the article’s content, to reflect the anti-Communist perspective that a mainstream American readership might have had at that time. But American voices like Joseph Stilwell, Edgar Snow, Theodore White, and others were complicating the simple narrative of support for the Nationalists’ attempts to eradicate the Chinese Communists. Stilwell, Snow, White, and here, Tappan, gave the American reader a human face to the distant civil war, and soon also the Chinese war of resistance, which the Americans would not join until the end of 1941. In the above article, Tappan, a foreign observer on the ground in the interior of Hainan, voices a perspective that captures the complexity of China’s civil war on the eve of the Japanese invasion.
In the summer of 1937, Feng Baiju and the Communist movement on Hainan had been reduced greatly to only a handful of fighters, and their contact with the central mainland Communist authorities, now based in northwestern Yan’an, had been severed. There were still Communist operatives in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and they did maintain connections with the Yan’an authorities. Feng knew that if he could make his way there, he would be able to receive updated instructions and know how to best proceed.
Shortly after Feng’s return, he dutifully approached the local Nationalist authorities with the aim to arrange a framework for cooperation. It is noteworthy that this was not something that automatically followed the lead of the mainland Nationalists and Communists. While the lack of communication between the Hainan and mainland Communists explains the lag in directives and awareness, there was naturally a communication flow between the Hainan Nationalist governing authorities and their mainland counterparts. When Feng traveled to Haikou with the intention of arranging an alliance with the Nationalist authorities, however, he and his wife were captured by Nationalist soldiers, and he was imprisoned.
This detention would lead to a host of political problems for Feng in later years, because he was accused of collaborating with the Nationalists and betraying his comrades in order to ensure his release. These accusations, while potent and perhaps fatal to Feng during the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) were not considered seriously at the time. There was little question as to Feng’s absolute loyalty among any who knew him well, and his release was secured not by any brokering between Feng and his captors, but rather by a combination of pressure from Zhou Enlai, Ye Jianying and the mainland Communist authorities, and vociferous complaints from the overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia that had come to see Feng as the bearer of the torch of anti-Japanese resistance.
The awkward captivity and release of the Communist leader, Feng Baiju, also reflected this complex interaction. Hainan’s remoteness added to the confusion and complexity of the battle lines, alliances, and revolutionary itineraries of China, and it seems from both Feng’s captivity and the frequent executions of suspected Communists, that the Nationalist authorities on Hainan tended toward an even more brutal and oppressive anti-Communist policy than Chiang Kai-shek on the mainland. The Xi’an Incident in December 1936 and the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan in July 1937 had an impact on the Hainan situation, and probably saved Feng Baiju’s life.
Violence and confusion had prevailed on Hainan as a result of both the sporadic communications between the Hainan Communists and their mainland counterparts, along with the hostile relationship between the Hainan governing authorities and Chiang Kai-shek’s government on the mainland. The Liang-Guang Incident of June 1936 had exposed one of the many major cracks in the Chinese ruling Nationalist Party’s foundation, and the Xi’an Incident of December 1936 exposed another. The divisions between China’s regional rulers and the Nanjing government in the lead-up to the July 1937 outbreak of full-scale war meant that channels of communication and command were shaky at best, broken and not to be trusted at worst. Sometimes the Communists benefited from this alliance, as when regional leaders allowed the mainland Long Marchers to move through their territories quickly to avoid a confrontation that would mean casualties on both sides.
It was late in 1938 that the Hainan Nationalist military authorities, then under General Wang Yi (1900–1948) accepted the Communist fighters into an alliance at what became known as the “Yunlong Reorganization” (Yunlong gaibian). The reorganization was named for the northern town where the talks took place, near Haikou and near Feng Baiju’s hometown of Changtai village. In the first year of the Japanese invasion, as the Nanjing government retreated first to Hankou and then to its wartime capital of Chongqing, Japanese forces had not yet landed on Hainan. Some bombing missions terrorized the population, and demonstrated the destructive capacity of the Japanese air power, but no troops had arrived in force. In September of 1938, the bombing of the island’s northern city of Haikou intensified, and representative of the Nationalist and Communist forces met to discuss a formal alliance in resistance to the Japanese. Following an initial exchange of communications, the commander of the Guangdong Twenty-First Regiment, General Wang Yi met with Feng Baiju and other representatives of the small Communist fighting force.
Now the United Front would officially come to Hainan, almost two years late. The Communists on Hainan had been reduced by fatigue and suppression to a guerrilla fighting force of about one hundred. The agreement framed by Wang Yi and Feng Baiju in October of 1938 established the legitimate operation of these forces, and an anti-Japanese alliance between Wang’s Nationalists and Feng’s Communists on Hainan. The basic points of the “Yunlong Reorganization” established first that the Nationalists and Communists would ally to fight the Japanese; second, that the Communist forces would be reorganized and renamed the Guangdong People’s Anti-Japanese Independent Regiment of the 14th District; third, that leaders of the units within this force would be chosen in consultation between Nationalist and Communist representatives; fourth, that the new force would construct its own training and education facilities; and fifth, that Nationalist authorities would contribute a monthly stipend of 8,000 yuan to the new force. The changes that followed were rapid. Less than a month after the November 1938 signing of the Yunlong agreement, the immediate legitimacy of the Communist movement brought its recruiters into the daylight. Visibility of the movement tripled the fighting force from one hundred to three hundred by December, with more than two hundred firearms purchased and acquired through aid from the Nationalists.9
Feng Baiju carried on as the Hainan Communists’ leader. Little more than a year after his imprisonment, he was now a rising star and rallying symbol of the movement to resist the Japanese invasion. With the fall of major southern Chinese mainland cities, most Hainanese believed that the Hainanese resistance would be called on soon to fight the Japanese on the beaches, in the forests, and in the streets of Hainan. Overseas Hainanese also became involved, and sent aid to any on the island who would resist the Japanese. In December of 1938, while the Communists and Nationalists of Hainan were setting the terms for their cooperation at Yunlong, the Reverend and Mrs. Tappan traveled across the water to Hong Kong to celebrate a “real ‘homeside’ Christmas away from home.” While there, as Mrs. Luella Tappan recalled in a narrative written for her grandchildren, “Some wealthy Hainanese merchants from Singapore … invited the head of our family [Reverend Tappan] to a feast. … They had a fund to send down to their friends cut off behind the Japanese lines in Hainan.” The merchants gave the Tappans $20,000 and 100,000 quinine pills, with the promise of more to follow. The Tappans accepted the money and medicine, and thus joined the Chinese resistance to the Japanese more than two years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.10 But it was only a matter of months before the Japanese occupation of Hainan.
In December of 1938, to Reverend Tappan and the mission community on Hainan, Japan’s invasion of the island seemed imminent. It had been a year and a half since the July 1937 start of the full-scale conflict in Beijing, and now most of the Chinese coast had fallen to the Japanese onslaught. Most recently, Japan took Guangzhou (Canton), and the Japanese forces that sought to completely subdue China saw in Hainan a hole in the east coast firmament that they hoped could be sealed off as a route of supplying the fighting forces of China. Some American aid flowed to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, but to the confusion of the Hainanese who spoke with Americans on the island, the United States also continued to trade with Japan. American munitions and fuel allowed the bombing and violence perpetrated in China by the Japanese forces. In his Christmas contribution titled “War Shadows” in the American Presbyterian Mission’s 1938 Hainan Newsletter, Tappan wrote:
The Chinese are more than friendly to foreign missionaries and Christian workers. They flock to our mission compounds for refuge in times of bombing. But they still hold on to their ancient superstitions as we were reminded by the way the crowds have swarmed to the large idol fair which has been held the past three days in the temple over the wall from our compound. The fact that Christian nations are selling war planes, gasoline and shrapnel to enable Japan to bomb defenseless Chinese does not help the cause of the Prince of Peace. After a bombing it is hard to answer Chinese viewing the ruins when they ask why America helps Japan to do this? We find it difficult to say that American sells war materials to anyone who pays the price. When will Christian nations practice Christianity at home as well as send missionaries to China to preach it? Then only will there be peace on earth and good will toward men.11
Tappan’s position, and that of other Americans who agreed with him, were caught up in the paradoxes of their position, and his frustration is palpable even in a Christmas message to his countrymen, his flock, and his colleagues. Beyond monetary aid and refuge, the Tappans and other foreign observers could not stem the inevitable and impending arrival of the Japanese landing forces. Sealing off the coast from foreign aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and establishing airfields and naval stations on Hainan led the Japanese to invade the island. Tapping into Hainan’s natural resources and quelling anti-Japanese resistance there also drove the Japanese plans for occupation. The task was to be carried out largely by the Japanese navy, following some probing actions along Hainan’s southern beaches and a brief bombing campaign.
The landing of Japanese naval and army forces on Hainan in mid-February was a very quick action considering the ample size of the island. According to Japanese news outlets, the initial action resulted in the loss of three Japanese lives.12 After some probing activity on the southern coast, near the natural harbors of Sanya and Yulin, the first major landing took place around the northern settlements of Haikou and Qiongzhou, and was conducted by a Taiwan (Formosa) Mixed Brigade, combined with Japanese special naval and army forces. Within a matter of days, the Nationalist authorities in the major coastal towns from Haikou in the north to Sanya in the south had either surrendered or fled, and the Japanese were in complete control of the island. By February 14, Sanya harbor had been seized by Japanese naval authorities, and work was underway to develop the great military potential of the port.
In the months and years to come, during hostilities with the Japanese, Hainanese would occasionally be surprised to find that some of the occupying Japanese soldiers were actually Taiwanese. One Hainan historian noted that over a short period, twenty Taiwanese soldiers deserted from the First and Second Taiwanese Infantry Regiments with which they arrived on the island, going on to ally with local Chinese guerrilla forces. They brought with them much-needed guns and munitions.
In this account, shortly after the Japanese occupation began, one of the Taiwanese soldiers began frequenting a village shop for his meals, and confided his grief with the local landlady. He called her “auntie” and bemoaned his fate as a soldier in the Japanese imperial forces. When his hostess asked why he had joined the Japanese military in the first place, he said that his family had always been poor, and that this was his only way to provide for them. In this account, local Communist guerrillas contacted the young Taiwanese soldier, Li Shuihang, and offered him the opportunity to prove his loyalty to China. He did so by delivering pistols and communication equipment, and then was accepted as a defector under Ma Baishan’s (1907–1992) command.13
But this anecdotal success of the resistance forces on the island was certainly not the norm, and the Japanese conquest of the island’s major northern and southern ports was completed in a matter of days, and all coastal towns under Japanese control by April. In the early days of the occupation, Japanese geologists were escorted around the island, surveying the soil’s mineral content. Finding iron in the island’s southwestern interior, this became one of the crucial reasons for the Japanese occupation. Besides its strong position as a naval and air base for the blockade and continued assaults on the Chinese and Southeast Asian mainland, Hainan’s mineral potential was again touted as reason to make inroads to the inaccessible interior and find a way to tap its rich resources.
According to a November 1940 International News Service story out of Hong Kong, the Japanese authorities also sought precious metals on Hainan, including gold and silver. “The pot of gold exists, well informed circles here insist, and pointed out that the Japanese simply cannot find it because only the coastal regions of the island are in Japanese hands, while the hinterland has remained under Chinese control. Guerrilla warfare is going on in many parts of Hainan, to which smaller Japanese units dare not venture.”14
By late 1940, according to this report, salt was the main resource being sent to Japan from Hainan, but in the coming years, Japanese forces would begin to venture inland, finding iron and building light rail links to the coast. Sugar and cattle were also the most immediately available resources that the Japanese authorities sent from Hainan to their forces on the Chinese mainland and back to Japan. The quest for precious metals on Hainan seems to reflect a continuation of the narrative of Hainan as a potential treasure island, and the ongoing perception of the great possibilities and wealth that might be realized through development and investment. In this way the Japanese occupiers continued a centuries-old tradition of ambitious but ultimately failed plans to develop Hainan’s perceived potential.
In December of 1940, the alliance between the Communists and Nationalists on Hainan erupted in violence. Since the Yunlong reorganization of December 1938, and then the Japanese invasion of February 1939, Communist regular forces on the island had increased steadily as a result of effective propaganda, broad land reform policy appeal, and efficient organization. That organization came in part as a result of renewed contact with the mainland Communist central command at Yan’an. In the summer of 1940, Zhou Enlai ordered the native Hainanese and Long March veteran, Zhuang Tian, to return to Hainan and help with organization there. When Zhuang left for Hainan, Zhou was clear about how he and the Party envisioned the narrow command structure on Hainan: “Comrade Feng Baiju is the banner of the people of Hainan. The view of Party Central is that he should serve as Hainan Party secretary, the leader of the anti-Japanese guerrilla military forces, and the chief political representative. This will implement a unified leadership in the revolutionary struggle of Hainan. Take this directive to the Special Committee on Hainan. When you arrive in Hainan, you will support the work of Comrade Feng Baiju, respect him, and carry out the revolutionary work under this unified leadership.”15 Zhou’s words, as promulgated by Zhuang Tian, reinforced Feng’s authority, which some including Li Ming had challenged during and after Feng’s captivity. After the summer of 1940, Feng was known as “the banner of the people of Hainan” to those who supported him, and Zhou Enlai’s endorsement settled any question as to who spoke for the CCP on the island.
As the leadership question was being settled, the Communist presence on Hainan grew to three thousand fighting men and women with the Hainan Independent Column. The expanded, strengthened, and stabilized ranks of the Communists spread across the island, establishing guerrilla bases with the confidence that the Nationalist authorities had sanctioned their growth, and the Japanese forces were not adequate to track and quash them. Beyond the fighting force, civilian support for the Communists was also growing. The overseas Hainanese, many of whom had alerted the public to Feng’s imprisonment, now rallied to his banner in increasing numbers. They sent funds, supplies, and their youth to support the Hainan Communists. In Hong Kong the Singapore Hainanese merchants had given the Tappans money and medicine to distribute on Hainan, and Feng Baiju maintained these contacts as well. In his public and private record of these days, Reverend Tappan makes no suggestions that the guerrillas he is supplying are Communists. But under the agreement of the “Yunlong reorganization,” the Hainan Communists had been folded into the resistance forces of the island, and it is unlikely that the partisan fighters would have been brazen or foolish enough to wear insignia. Indeed it seems likely that the overseas Hainanese were using Tappan to supply the Hainan Communist forces because the historical record shows extensive contact between Feng personally and the extensive network of Hainanese communities throughout the region. In the year from November of 1939 until October of 1940, there are only three extant documents from Feng’s hand, and all three of them are directed to the overseas Hainanese community in the region. They include matters like requests for aid and updates on the situation in Hainan. In the communications, Feng explains that a lack of medicine is causing wounded fighters to die when they might have lived with the help of basic supplies.16
In these communications, Feng also requests winter clothes, which might sound unusual to one familiar only with the image of Hainan as a tropical island. In the rainy winter months, high in the interior mountains, the temperatures drop, and the insidious, damp chill made the partisan fighters miserable. In one of Feng Baiju’s recollections, during the darkest days of the guerrilla struggle, he walked among the thin ranks of supporters, checking on their health and morale. He recalled a young man of nineteen who was unaccustomed to the bitter cold of the island’s mountains. Still he put on a brave face for his commander, though he was soaked to the bone and cold. Feng asked him how he was doing and the boy replied, “I’m not cold if you’re not cold.” Feng smiled and replied, “Well, I’m freezing!”17
In the early days of the Japanese occupation, the Japanese imperial naval authorities took control of the island under Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo (1886–1953), commander of the Fifth Fleet, and appointed a “puppet government” of Chinese officials, led by Zhao Shihuan. According to a 1945 report sent by the Hainan Communist leadership to the mainland Communist headquarters in Yan’an, the “puppet army” of Chinese who served the Japanese numbered more than five thousand, and was scattered throughout the island. By 1945, there were puppet forces in every county of the island, usually garrisoned with the Japanese forces. But the report notes that no prominent Hainanese had joined the puppet army. The leadership was neither famous nor infamous on the island.18
Zhao Shihuan (1903–1960) was from Hainan’s northeastern town of Wenchang, like many of the island’s elites. As an excellent student, he was sent to the mainland for his schooling, and eventually to France where he earned a doctoral degree, according to several sources, though it is not clear in what subject. He returned to China to teach, and at the outbreak of the war with Japan in 1937, he returned to Hainan. According to one of the few biographical treatments of Zhao Shihuan, he had returned to his hometown to teach because he had lost confidence in both of the two major Chinese political options. His personal experience trying to work within the Nationalist government on the mainland had left him disillusioned with its corruption, and the Communists seemed to have little hope of success. When Japanese forces arrived in Wenchang, they heard that there was a foreign-educated teacher in the area, and sought him out. Zhao was “invited” to serve in the puppet government that was being hastily assembled, and it seems that he had little choice but to accept the post.19
Zhao, and others who served in the collaborationist regime of Hainan, are generally deemed Hanjian, or traitors, in historical accounts of the Japanese occupation, but it is worth noting that Zhao and many others were effectively forced into this service. In the Hainanese historical record as well as the later accounts, there is little invective and disgust with those who served in the collaborationist, or “puppet” government. This is a significant difference from the kind of tropes that pervade much of Chinese writing about those who served the Japanese, whether they did so willingly or not.20
Examining the Japanese invasion and occupation of portions of China during the 1930s and 1940s is a challenge to the human psyche, and often the writing about the horrors of the conflict are justifiably charged with emotion. Often in China, at the time of writing, the generations that are once or even twice removed from the events of the war in China continue to nurse resentment and even fury at the inhumanity of Japanese actions in China and throughout the region. Wartime memory as a political football in the region unfortunately further complicates the issue, as some politicians and pundits aim to harness nationalism or racism in order to bolster their platform. Still, in spite of these challenges, and sometimes because of them, inspiring examples of stellar and indefatigable scholarship emerge from the archives, and more often from the excavated fields and the oral histories of Hainan. During my archival work and travel in Hainan, I had the privilege of working with one such historian, Sato Shojin, whose aim it is, in a very real sense, to dig up and lay bare the evidence of atrocities on the island.21 Sato publishes his work in newsletters and journals, and curates historical museum exhibits. In museums, he told me that he sometimes encounters resistance from sponsoring Japanese entities that seem less relentless than he is in their determination to catalog these horrors. He also makes and screens documentary films, including interviews with former comfort women and other victims of Japanese atrocities. He catalogs mass graves across the island, including Japanese iron works and other work sites where workers were executed. In a 2012 interview, Sato did not mince words about his aims. The atrocities, including enslavement of women and men, the mass killings, must be documented. The subjects of his studies who survived the intervening years are naturally reaching the end of their lives, and Sato’s work has taken on a renewed urgency. In more than two dozen trips to Hainan, Sato’s work has been singularly driven. He aims to achieve a direct apology from the Japanese government, and have that apology substantiated with reparations to the living victims and the families of the victims who suffered.22
The Japanese legacy of institutional rape and murder continues to live on Hainan.23 Nearly twelve thousand Japanese marines and more than four thousand men in the police force kept the forces of resistance firmly in check.
In 1944, the Japanese estimates of the Chinese resistance were more than seven thousand troops loyal to the Chongqing Nationalist government, or the Bao’an forces (literally, “Peace-keeping” forces), more than four thousand Communist troops, and almost six thousand local irregular forces who did not seem to have any larger cause to identify with except resistance to the Japanese and defense of the island.24
In one 1945 telegram sent to the Communist headquarters in Yan’an (most likely sent from Guangzhou or Hong Kong, since the Hainan Communists had no access to wireless radio until the following year) the Hainan Communists were gaining in strength and cohesion three months before the Japanese defeat. More than five thousand Communist regulars were divided into four units operating in separate areas of the island. Their command had become clearly centralized, with Feng Baiju as the military and political leader of the Communist movement. The telegram claims that the Communist regulars on Hainan were well supported by the villagers of Hainan in terms of their food requirements, but their medical needs were great, and at the time of sending the message, more Hainan Communist soldiers were dying of diseases and complications from wounds than deaths in battle. The Japanese navy surrounded and ruled the island, but the complete lack of Communist sea power was not a problem for the Communist soldiers and guerrillas who mainly restricted their movements to the jungle interior.25
While the regular forces were based mainly in the mountains, the plains of northern Hainan also had Communist allies in underground militias and other irregular forces. According to the May 1945 message to the Communist military headquarters, the Hainan Communist presence was widely felt.26 While its regular forces conducted asymmetrical warfare against Nationalist and Japanese forces, their ranks increased during the Japanese occupation, and they grew in popularity. In villages where the Nationalists and the Japanese were rarely seen, it was not a risk to proclaim one’s sympathy for the Communists and their leader, Feng Baiju. There was always the risk of being reported to the Nationalist or Japanese authorities in a nearby town, but the long reach of the Communists was growing, and Communist supporters walked tall in remote villages during the late days of the Japanese occupation. These were the underground militia members who bided their time, and contented themselves, for the moment, to proclaim their support for their comrades in the mountain forests. Their chance to kill and die for Hainan’s red flag would come in 1950.27
But the Japanese reputation of cruelty and collective punishment extended beyond the regions where they held direct power, and this could counteract the recruiters and propaganda workers of the Hainan Communists. Soon after Japanese learned of the guerrillas’ leader, Feng Baiju and his Qiongshan county roots, either through rumors of heroism or “wanted, dead or alive” notices in Japanese and Nationalist papers, Japanese marines paid a visit to his hometown of Changtai, then again, and again. Ten times Japanese and Chinese soldiers in the service of the Japanese authority raided the village, looking for Feng Baiju or anyone they could find with the surname Feng, terrorizing the village, the county, and the island.28 A young girl was returning from the forest and she hid and watched as, on the final Japanese visit, a Chinese officer led one hundred Chinese and Japanese soldiers into the town. Seven women were publicly gang-raped by the soldiers. All of the villagers that the soldiers could find were then herded into a house, including the girl’s parents. The house was doused in gasoline and burned. In remembering this horror sixty-eight years later, she muttered that her family name was not even Feng.29
There was a late attempt, in the early spring of 1945, by the Japanese to bolster its presence on Hainan, but it was soon reversed as the island’s aircraft were withdrawn to the Japanese homeland in May of 1945. Desperation in the Japanese military administration also led to increasingly harsh treatment of the prisoners that they held on Hainan. According to one American military observer who arrived on the island in the weeks following the Japanese surrender, the prison camps on the island were “every bit as cruel as Buchenwald or Dachau.”30 Six years of Japanese occupation on the island escalated to a bloody finale under the authority of the Japanese Navy who worked in concert with zaibatsu like the Mitsui Corporation, to enslave Chinese workers, hold captives in demonstrably unlivable conditions, and massacre military prisoners and civilians in orgies of beheading and bayoneting, “to provide a diversion for the Japanese officers.” Allied servicemen from Australia, Great Britain, Holland, India, and the United States suffered and hundreds died in Japanese captivity, some executed, some perishing in forced labor, some dying of disease or starvation, and some killed by Hainanese bandits when they were out on work parties.31
But the Hainanese bore most of the brutality, with some accounts putting the death toll at fully one third of the adult male population, which would mean nearly half a million dead, and thousands of women. The most recent authoritative Chinese study on the Japanese occupation of Hainan puts the number of violent deaths under the Japanese at more than four hundred thousand.32 This figure is about one in five of the Hainanese population, including men and women of all ages, killed under the Japanese occupation. The work of the Japanese historian and documentarian, Sato Shojin, confirms these figures, while emphasizing the human toll through his tireless interviewing among the elderly witnesses and survivors of the Japanese occupation of Hainan.
Beyond the Hainanese and prisoners of war, tens of thousands of Chinese and Korean detainees were brought to Hainan to augment the slave labor force that also consisted of Han and Li Hainanese. Recently, Sato successfully lobbied the Hainanese provincial government to honor the Korean dead whose mass graves were recently discovered near the southern city of Sanya. The Korean dead had been captured and transported to Hainan to work in the island’s southern region building docks and shipyards, and the light-gauge railroad that connected Hainan’s iron mines to the southern coast.33
The same American military observer cited earlier noted that of one hundred thousand Hong Kong civilian internees who had been brought by the Japanese to work on a Hainan mining project, only twenty thousand had survived to see the end of the war with Japan.34 This figure is astounding in itself, and if it can be extended to the rest of Japanese rule of Hainanese slaves and internees, the astronomical figures that are used by most Chinese historians about the death toll of the Japanese occupation of Hainan are probably accurate.35
Like most of the information collected by the Hainan Communist leadership, news of the Japanese surrender of August 15, 1945, came late—on the 23rd of August—and through a Nationalist source.36 At the time of the Japanese surrender in August and September of 1945, the Hainan Communist statistics that have since been compiled by Chinese historians stood as follows. The Communists controlled territories inhabited by over one million people—roughly a third of the island’s population at that time. Much of the Communists’ holdings in this period were inland mountainous hideouts that had been secured with the help of the Li people who hosted them there.
In the ensuing civil war, these inland bases would be the main operating region of the Hainan Communists, but immediately following the Japanese surrender and withdrawal, the five active detachments of Communist forces were holding or fighting for significant territories throughout the island.37 This was one of the high tides of their regional control of Hainan, which might account in part for the negative reaction to the orders from the northern Communist headquarters to send their best leaders and fighters to the north less than a year later. As is explained in the following chapter, the Communist alliance with the Li people following the Li Baisha Uprising in 1943 brought a renewed vitality to the Communist movement, including substantial territorial gains.
Following the Japanese defeat, the Hainan Communist leadership expected to build on these gains, not to forfeit them to the Nationalists, who were also reduced to guerrilla tactics in the island’s interior. The Nationalists, while enjoying far broader international recognition, most importantly including the support of the Americans and support of a kind from the Soviets, did not have a promising future on Hainan unless the hostile Communist and Li threats could be neutralized. The Nationalist leadership on Hainan, as under Chen Jitang, had established a precedent for relatively autonomous governance from the mainland over the “fiefdom” of Hainan, so that even with nominal control over the island, the Nationalist regime could not necessarily dictate policy on the island as well as in the mainland provinces or Taiwan after the Japanese withdrawal. Following the Japanese defeat, regional peace talks were attempted between the Nationalists and a delegate of the Communist leadership of Hainan in the northern capital of Haikou. While the Nationalists were recognized internationally as the legitimate government on the island, they were not in control of large regions that were under Communist and militia control, and the Communists entered these negotiations with a strong hand to bargain for power. Military victories through the 1940s had reinforced these claims, especially following the 1943 Baisha Uprising. After 1943, Communist strength grew steadily in Li territory through the Li-Communist alliance. The undeclared civil war continued between the Nationalists and Communists, and by early 1946, the Communists were able to claim a series of counterattack victories as they claimed that the Nationalists violated the armistice that followed the Japanese withdrawal.38
The Communist claim to occupying territories that accounted for nearly a third of the island’s inhabitants is explained by their hold on the populous northeastern region of the island. The territory the Communists held did not include the important cities of northeastern Wenchang or northern Haikou, but many of the northern towns that were slightly inland of these cities were under Communist control at the time of the Japanese retreat. These cities were turned over to the Nationalist government as the Japanese evacuated.
By 1943, a foreign observer noted in the Far Eastern Survey that Hainan and the southern Chinese coast had “recently been very quiet, since its [Japanese] garrison is barely sufficient for defense.”39 Japanese forces were drawn to the mainland and out to the Pacific, leaving Hainan fortifications relatively sparse. Guerrilla forces on the island for the most part continued to frustrate inland Japanese activities, and held their mountain strongholds rather than engaging the Japanese forces in pitched battle. This was the time of the formation of a crucial alliance between the island’s indigenous Li people and the Communist forces on the island.