NEW ALLIES
The Baisha Uprising and the Li-Communist Alliance, 1943
It was in the island’s interior that Hainan’s Communist movement found its salvation after the challenges of Nationalist extermination campaigns and Japanese invasion. Feng Baiju later wrote of the Communists on Hainan that while the movement began with little Li participation, by spring of 1950, one in five members of the Hainan Independent Column were members of the island’s minority community.1 The Japanese occupation was mainly restricted to the coast, and the headquarters of the Nationalist and Communist resistance to the occupation both moved to the island’s interior for its relative safety. This shift paralleled the mainland retreat to the west by the Nationalists to Chongqing and the Communists to Yan’an. The Communists were at a low point in their Hainan activities under Nationalist extermination campaigns in the early 1930s, and the Japanese occupation beginning in February 1939 compounded their problems. The Nationalists and Communists had formed an uneasy alliance, but they did not completely integrate their military forces, and so with the Japanese occupation, they were forced to compete for space in the island’s interior.
In the island’s southern mountains, the Nationalists and Communists encountered the indigenous Li people in different ways. Nationalist forces tried to displace the Li, which led to resistance and sometimes violence from the Li. There are accounts of Nationalist forces carrying out massacres of entire Li villages either by way of example or simply in order to pacify and fortify a region without the unknown variable of the Li presence. In 1943, Li headmen, Wang Guoxing and Wang Yujin, led the largest Li uprising in recorded history. Shortly after the uprising, under the leadership of Wang Guoxing and Feng Baiju, a confederation of Li people and the Hainan Communists struck an alliance, and together they went on to fight both Nationalists and Japanese.
The Baisha Uprising is an important watershed in the island’s history. The Japanese occupation of Hainan was one of enslavement, brutalization, and mass death, and the impact of the Japanese presence on Hainan was felt severely by the Li. And yet, in the midst of the Japanese occupation, the Baisha Uprising was aimed at the Nationalists, and not the Japanese. The Nationalist occupation of Li territory was unprecedented among mainlanders’ political and military activity in the island’s interior. The organization and scale of the violent Li response also had no precedent in their own history, though their ancestors had left a long legacy of violent uprisings against mainland regimes. Following the Japanese defeat in 1945, the Nationalists were able to return to the coasts and abandon the Li territory, but the newly allied forces of Li and Communists made that inland refuge their central base area for the next five years of civil war. The survival of the Communist movement on Hainan, and hence the ease of the 1950 takeover, is thus at least partially a result of the Li-Communist alliance that followed the Baisha Uprising.
The surveyor from Beijing, Peng Chengwan, who came to Hainan in 1919, believed that establishing a solid, working relationship with the Li people was essential to any lasting development of the island. Like mainland emissaries to Hainan for centuries, Peng assumed that the Li would happily “Sinify” if given the chance; that is, they would become civilized in the Chinese image, if only they were shown the path to this progress. Sinification of the Li was a precondition for a working relationship with the republican regime.2 For centuries, only a thin coastal ring and the northern plains of Hainan had been successfully settled and haltingly developed by Han Chinese people from the mainland, and the island’s interior and southern highlands remained completely unsettled by Han people and undeveloped on mainland terms. Many of the Li people there continued to practice swidden agriculture well into the twentieth century. They used bows and arrows, spears, and flintlock rifles for hunting and inter-village warfare.3 They also used these weapons in perennial uprisings that were sometimes sparked by the abuses of Han settlers, merchants, and officials.
For more than two thousand years, mainland regimes had claimed all of Hainan as their own, but in fact, it was only the Mongols, who ruled China during the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), who had ever successfully conquered the entire island’s territory including the interior. The Yuan instituted a policy called the “Li military 10,000 household government,” in which a vertical command system incorporated the Li in the government of the Mongol regime on Hainan. This was similar to the system used in Yuan military organization on the mainland, and it was successful in preventing significant Li uprisings for much of the dynasty. But the precedent of combining central flexibility and the granting of autonomy was not followed by subsequent dynasties. Subsequent imperial outposts in Li territory were largely untenable and they served little economic benefit that could not be attained through enterprising Han merchants who visited the territory and sometimes married into Li villages.4
The Qing empire (1644–1911), according to Anne Csete, a scholar of the Li in imperial times, offered a qualified change in the mainland regimes’ legacy of clumsy and brutal rule of Hainan and the Li.5 This was especially true in the eighteenth century, known by historians as the high Qing, and a period of lasting domestic peace and prosperity.6 A Qing official of the mid-eighteenth century left a record of what he experienced and learned as an official on Hainan. He wrote with regret, after the suppression of one of the more violent uprisings of the Li during his tenure. The Li once lived in peace, he wrote, and it was only the provocations of dishonest merchants, settlers, and officials that brought about the cycle of uprisings and suppressions, and resulted in a constant state of uneasy relations.7 In this common lament by antimercantile Confucian officials, the exploitation and dishonest dealings at the hands of predatory merchants and local officials caused the suspicion and volatility among the Li that led them to rise up in violence in earlier dynasties as well.8 Even after the fall of the Qing, Peng Chengwan agreed with this general assessment during his 1919 tour of the island. He added an element, however, that could not have been relevant to his Qing predecessor on the island. Peng wrote that there was an “anti-Han revolutionary movement” (pai-Han geming yundong) afoot on the island, and that it was not simply an issue of economic or political exploitation, or of brutal suppression. It was an animosity based in race and culture that drove the Li to violent resistance.9
This ethnic or racial distinction that Peng made simplified what was in fact a very complex set of problems. He did not fail to see the complexity of the situation, citing similar problems to what had been noted by the eighteenth-century Qing official—exploitation by merchants and also brutality at the hands of glory-seeking generals.10 But in lumping all Li violence into an island-wide anti-Han revolution, Peng’s anxieties may have been more a reflection of the Chinese political climate during which he visited Hainan and wrote the survey, than an accurate account of the motivations for Li violence and resistance. Han chauvinism had helped to topple the Qing dynasty in 1911, with the Manchu rulers depicted as alien invaders in revolutionary tracts. Histories filled with scenes of rapine and massacres of Han Chinese at the hands of the alien Manchus resurfaced in the revolution to overthrow the Qing, even though these atrocities of the Manchu conquest had occurred nearly three hundred years earlier. Peng was a product of a culture in which the line between Chinese patriotism and Han chauvinism was a thin one from Hainan’s perspective, and this certainly influenced his perception of Li-Han relations on Hainan in the early republic.
From the perspective of the mainland or of coastal Hainanese Chinese, and also in the view of many foreign observers, the Li were divided into two distinct groups. In Chinese these groups were rather dramatically labeled as “raw” and “cooked” (sheng and shu, respectively). The former were the wild Li who lived in the island’s interior with little or no contact between themselves and Han Chinese or foreigners. The latter, the “cooked” Li, engaged in trade and sometimes intermarriage with the Han Chinese, learned the Chinese language, and even served the mainland regimes as leaders of their village or of a network of villages.
By the fall of the Qing, an imperial system of giving Li village leaders official posts was at least 150 years old.11 In the previous Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the mainland administration gave the Li a relatively free hand to govern their own affairs. The policy of allowing the Li to more or less govern themselves does not seem to have connected the Li to the Ming government with a credible command structure, as it had in the Mongol Yuan dynasty, but rather seems to have been a question of the Ming military being incapable of, or unconcerned with, the direct governance of significant portions of Li territory with any efficiency. The Qing was more successful than the Ming in governing the Li through the implementation of a system of accountable village headmen. Under the Qing system, these leaders took responsibility for the village or villages that they led.12
In March of 1872, a British consul posted to Ningbo traveled around Hainan and delivered an official report. This was twelve years after Haikou had officially been opened (but little used) as a treaty port following the Second Opium War. Robert Swinhoe’s report, “The Aborigines of Hainan,” is informed by racial supremacy, referring to the Li people as “deformed” and to some as being more “docile” than others.13 But it is worth noting the cultural cross-sections that Swinhoe draws in his observations of the Li, especially in his use of the standard Han Chinese distinction between the shu and sheng indigenous peoples.
At Nychow the natives were often referred to as the shuh Le [shu, or “cooked” Li], but they differed in no respect from the wild tribes of their neighborhood except that their headmen acknowledged a kind of responsibility to the Chinese authorities which enabled the people of their tribe to seek labor in the Chinese towns.14
The distinction between the shu and sheng is usually one of culture in most orthodox Chinese accounts of nationalities within its borders. Those minorities who are said to “have culture” (you wenhua), traditionally meaning a Confucian or Han Chinese culture, are the shu or “cooked” savages. The civilizing projects of imperial China were directed at the marginal and cultural minorities as primarily a cultural endeavor.15 But it seems that the distinctions between the two groups as observed by an outsider who did not share the mainland Chinese cultural bias (though Swinhoe had his own biases), seem to be more political than cultural. This is revealing about both the leadership structure and the political organization of the Li people in their relationship with mainland regimes.
The cultural dimension of categorization of the Li, as these groups are commonly defined from the perspective of mainland Chinese official and cultural biases, seems to have been less important than is supposed in most Chinese materials. It was not necessarily sinification, or the adoption of Chinese culture that distinguished Li leadership and participation. While there was a wide variation of Li costume, custom, and political participation, there was also a clear identity of being a Li person that straddled the artificially imposed shu/sheng cultural divide. The Li who had adopted Chinese dress—the ones who had abandoned the loincloth and bow-and-arrow for trousers, tunic, and a porter’s pole—were not ultimately more malleable to the Han Chinese regime. On the contrary, it was precisely this type of Li individual, Wang Guoxing, who would lead his comrades in the Baisha Uprising of 1943. A peculiar preoccupation of ethnic studies is with those culturally distinct traits of a people that can be easily exoticized, feminized, or otherwise discursively “othered.” Emphasizing the distinctive cultural practices that can be exploited in tourist parks or the pages of a magazine can neglect the crucial political questions of a group’s struggle, and such is the case with the Li.
The Li people live primarily in the interior of Hainan island, and at the time of writing, number well over a million.16 The word “Li” is a Chinese language word, and the origins of its application to these indigenous people of Hainan who now bear that label is murky. The most common etymology of the Chinese character for this particular Li (黎) is ironically a very early linguistic reference of Han Chinese to themselves, and its initial meaning was “black-haired people.” Most Li call themselves Sai (赛), another Chinese word translated from the Li language, in which it is simply a word for the first-person plural pronoun. Most scholars agree, based on linguistics and ritual practices, that the Li originally came to Hainan thousands of years ago from what is today mainland Southeast Asia.17 The Li language, like several of the regional Chinese dialects of Hainan, falls into the Tai-Kadai or Kra-Dai language group (in Chinese this is the Zhuang-Dong group), while some dialects of the island are also related to the Chaoshan and Minnan dialects of the mainland; these claims are not without some controversy related to cultural and historical narratives surrounding the region.18 This sets Hainan apart from its Chinese island neighbor, Taiwan, which hosts an aboriginal culture that is much more strongly tied to Oceania and other islands of the South Pacific.
Ethnologists and anthropologist have also made much of Li hair-styling, jewelry, clothing, and tattooing. Different hair knots set apart the different groups of the Li across the island. Until the past few decades, Li women had their faces distinctively tattooed when they reached early adulthood, usually before taking a husband. This practice prepared them for recognition by their ancestors in the afterlife. The bare breasts of some Li women scandalized the Han Chinese visitors to Li territory, and some Li women wore many hoops of brass from their ears, often so large and heavy that they pulled down the earlobe, and they had to be tied over the head while they worked.19 These and other cosmetic characteristics of the Li woman, such as their short skirts, later banned as pornographic in the puritanical atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution, drew the focus of the cameras of foreign visitors.20 The convention of depicting a foreign culture or race as different through the appearance of the group’s female attire and appearance is nearly universal, and gendering the ethnic frontier as female is common in Chinese civilizing practice.21
More substantially, early observations reveal the source of a mainland stereotype of gender relations on Hainan that is often heard today, in which the women work much harder than their male counterparts, who are reputed to lounge in hammocks through the long, hot afternoons. Among the Li, and much of the Hainanese population, it was common for men and women to work equally hard in farming duties, which may be the source of this stereotype. Early mainlander and foreign observers on Hainan were struck by the equal sharing of labor on Hainan. One French visitor noted that, indeed, it seemed that the most arduous tasks were reserved for the women.22 It is difficult to take seriously the disdain of foreign observers as they sneer at the perceived laziness of their Hainan hosts, for in the next paragraph of their memoir, we watch them cheerfully cross little streams and brooks on the backs of their aging coolies.23 Perhaps some of these American and British observers, including Protestant missionaries, felt a prick of conscience as they were carried around by their lazy Hainanese hosts. One made such a lame excuse in his popular 1925 travelogue that it bears mention as an indication of the relationship between host and guest: “We trotted on, dripping; the old man [my emphasis] carried me across a sliver of a river to save the time I should have lost with my shoes.”24 From either a Western Christian or a mainland Chinese Confucian perspective, the Hainanese people, including both Li and Han, were profoundly unequal.25
In the orthodox jargon of Chinese empires, to “enter the map” (ru bantu) is the reward of ethnic minorities and border peoples who become tributaries or subjects of the realm.26 During the Japanese occupation of Hainan, this construct was flipped on its head as Chinese Nationalist and Communist armies retreated into the island’s central Li territories for survival, and it seemed that it would fall to the Li to decide their fate. First, in the face of the Japanese occupation of Hainan after 1939, the Nationalists’ armies withdrew into the southern mountains of the island, which was historically the Li domain. Later, a Li alliance with the Communists made Li territory the main base area for the allied forces on the island. Wang Guoxing (1894–1975) led the Li people in seeking out an alliance with the Chinese Communists.
Wang’s father had been a leader of several villages. According to Wang’s biographies, his father was well respected in the Li community.27 He served in the uncertain years that came after the fall of the Qing. The weakness of the central government in the first two decades of the Republic prevented any coherent and consistent relationship between Hainan’s government and the Li people. Even during times of strong central Chinese governance, there were few exceptions to the prolonged conflicts between the Chinese military and the Li. The final century of the Qing, the 1800s, were rife with violence between the Li and government forces. In times of disunity and weakness, the Li felt heavier tax burdens, and this was also the case in the early republic.28
Wang Guoxing’s father, Wang Zhenghe, felt that burden more than most as the leader of several villages scattered around his hometown of Hongmao. Under new Nationalist policies, it had appeared that the Li would be given an increase in their autonomy and their ability to choose their own fate in terms of economic and social activities. This shift toward self-rule echoed the Ming policies of allowing the Li to make their own way simply because the mountain-dwellers were beyond the reach of the central and provincial government. Work assignments and ritual observances were put in his hands, and social and economic organization seemed to be officially handed over to Li leaders like Wang Zhenghe.29
As Hainan officials began making their demands, however, they turned to Wang Zhenghe and other Li leaders again and again to implement burdensome policies of extraction. Cattle (water buffalo) were scarce in the highland Li community, but the Nationalist government made heavy demands on Li livestock, including their cattle, pigs, and chickens. The Li diet was generally low in meat, and slaughtering domestic animals of any kind was reserved for celebrations. An animal hierarchy reflected the value of animal flesh both in terms of nutrition and cultural and philosophical importance. Certain gatherings and minor celebrations warranted the slaughter of a chicken and the drinking of its blood. Slightly more important was the slaughter of a pig, and finally, reserved mostly for weddings and funerals, was the slaughter of water buffalo.30 Hunting was also a common source of meat for the Li, but game was neither large nor plentiful.
The meat they eat comes from little animals which they catch while they are at work [in their rice fields]. They bring them home in their little waist baskets and usually boil them. As for game (wild boar and deer) and fish, they are very seldom eaten.31
In another observation:
After the [rice] harvest, the young men amuse themselves by getting up hunting parties, when spears, bows and arrows, and guns (the latter in surprising numbers) are brought out for use.32
It is noteworthy that this latter observer attributed a kind of ritual or sporting aspect to the hunt, which is consistent with other observations. The Li did not hunt every day, and when they did it was not always a task of subsistence. The scarcity of game meant that they could not count on hunting to sustain themselves. Taxation in kind by the Nationalist government that targeted livestock thus had a deleterious impact on both the rituals and the diet of the Li community. By the mid-1930s, the Nationalist government on Hainan was badly in need of supplies for the military that kept it in power. Beef was needed to feed the army, and it was taken without regard to the impact that this extraction would have on the community from whence it came. Graft and corruption within the government and the military wasted much of the supplies that would otherwise be used to build an efficient army that could keep the regime in power.33 These leaks in the bureaucratic system that directed taxes away from their intended destination, from the perspective of the Li, only meant an ever-increasing need for their precious livestock. Soon, it became clear that livestock and other taxes would not be enough for the Nationalist regime on Hainan.
In 1934, Wang Zhenghe received requests to recommend Li youths to travel to Guangzhou to attend university on government scholarships.34 He was asked to choose the most deserving of the people in his village and the surrounding area. There is no record of whether Wang was wary of this order. Old Li men in the village would have remembered Qing policies of sending youths to study in the relatively cosmopolitan Hainanese centers of Haikou and Wenchang. Some of them went on to achieve official degrees and serve in the imperial government. Wang Zhenghe might have considered this a continuation of a policy that provided a channel to official power for the Li youths who were inclined to follow it.
On behalf of the Nationalists, Wang promulgated this policy in the surrounding region, and soon several hundred men and women had been assembled for the purpose of traveling to Guangzhou to study. The Li youths were sent off from their villages with much fanfare in the fall of 1934. Months passed, and when the students did not return for the usual holidays, Wang realized that he had been deceived, and in fact had helped in sending off these young people to be conscripted into the military. Later it was learned that the youngest males and the females in the 1934 cohort actually became a part of an exhibition in Guangzhou on the savage races of China’s margins.35
While the quaintness of the Li appearance and traditions were an exciting attraction in the bustling Chinese urban centers, the preservation of their culture does not seem to have been a priority.36 While the Li were an amusing museum piece, the development of the island required their modernization, and improved communications and industrialization, which in turn demanded better relations with, or cooperation from, the Li. The Li territory had to be opened up to investment that would exploit the mining capacity and strategic importance of the island. For this, the Li would have to either do business on the terms of the newcomers to the island, or die in their unwillingness to cooperate. Either way, the culture of the Li was indeed nothing more than a relic for anthropologists to study, while it lasted.37
The “lack of adequate communication facilities,” according to Nationalist China’s most prominent financier, Song Ziwen (T.V. Soong), had been responsible for the past failures of all attempts to develop the island, and the primitive infrastructure continued to hamper development efforts.38 Pushing forward with these development plans meant first crisscrossing the island with roads and communication lines, which would pull the Li out of their primitive existence. This was a continuation of earlier policy ambitions that had been favored by late Qing officials who turned their attention to southern China. Zhang Zhidong, for example, hoped to establish Hainan as a province separate from the authority of Guangdong Province on the mainland. Zhang believed that building roads around and across the island would be among the most important steps in this process, which would penetrate Li territory and elevate the island to deserving provincial status. In his view, the military development of the island also was essential in preparing it to be a province.39
Sinification of the Li was one consistent prerequisite for modernizing the island, as Peng Chengwan had called for in his 1919 survey.40 During the Nationalist rule of the Nanijng Decade, this cultural assault became much more pronounced. By the middle of the 1930s, pressure was increasing from the Nationalist government on the Li to abandon their cultural practices. On the eve of the Japanese occupation of Hainan, one American visitor watched the frantic response to his small party being mistaken for Nationalist agents in a Li village:
Before we reached Noh-Pong village, the people in the rice fields nearby ran in alarm at seeing my column. The village of 37 longhouses was practically deserted as we entered. A gong was being beaten frantically somewhere.
Only an old naked man greeted us. He was too old to run, I guess. We learned that a ceremony had been in progress, and the people, afraid we were soldiers who had come to smash their gods, had fled in alarm.
Soon the old man called them back, and in an hour, their shyness worn off, they continued with the ceremony. A man who had died three years before was being feted. Two gods about a foot high, and sitting on little chairs, were being “fed” rice balls while men played on flutes by exhaling through their nostrils, and the women wailed.41
No amount of idol-stomping by Nationalist soldiers would hasten the development of Hainan, nor improve the condition of the Li. The corruption and mismanagement of economic development on the island had led to the slow development of communication and transportation infrastructure.42 But the backwardness of the island’s inhabitants was also targeted, in part because tales of naked savages and their sorcery was more entertaining journalism, whether in America or mainland China.
In 1932, Nationalist commander, Chen Hanguang was tasked with suppression of the Li by the Nationalist governor of Hainan, Chen Jitang. Along with Wang Yi, Han Hanying, and other Nationalist officers and politicians, they implemented policies that led to the massacre and exploitation of thousands of Li, and also of the Miao minority. In the view of the Li leadership, it was Han chauvinism that fueled the merciless treatment of the Li and Miao.43 Even in a recollection by one man who served under Chen Hanguang, his nickname was well-deserved: “the king of the Hainan murderers.” Chen Hanguang’s appointment was based on personal connections he had established while studying in Japan. His classmate in his military courses there was the younger brother of the Hainan governor, Chen Jitang. Chen Hanguang led a unit of guards that was not answerable to the command of the political or military leadership of the Hainan government. He was given free rein to deal with unrest throughout the island in any way that he saw fit.44 From January through March of 1932, five hundred troops under Chen’s command attacked Li fighters ten times, but the confrontations ended without a formal resolution, and Chen withdrew his troops from Li territory.45 Massacres of Li villages were verified by foreign observers at the time, where the machine guns of Chen Hanguang’s unit of guards answered any disturbance that was led by Li warriors armed with spears, bows and arrows, and flintlock rifles. By the end of the 1930s, the Nationalists on Hainan only had about six thousand uniformed soldiers, but their superior firepower made Li suppression through massacres and punitive expeditions a relatively easy task.46 Collective punishment was the draconian policy of the Nationalists, as Leonard Clark observed the fate of a “luckless” target of Nationalist judgment in his National Geographic article on the Li.
Throughout this Ha country the headmen insisted that I be supplied with bodyguards while camping near their villages. They feared that a neighboring village might send assassins to murder us so that the village would be held responsible and be made the object of attack from a Chinese punitive expedition.
I saw the charred remains of one luckless village, punished for robbery. Hundreds of empty machine-gun shells still lay about in piles.47
Wang Guoxing’s father, Wang Zhenghe, served as zongguan, head local official, to the Hongmao region of Li territory. His own village and several surrounding villages chose him to represent them in their relationship with the ruling Nationalists. Wang Zhenghe received no salary, but he shouldered the burden of his people’s anger for conflicts with the government, including when the young Li cohort that he had recruited for the Nationalist education program never returned. Zhenghe became addicted to opium, though when this began is not clear from Wang Guoxing’s biography. Following the 1935 conscription, Wang Zhenghe used his voice as zongguan to oppose the policy and demand its reversal and recompense. In response to these efforts, he was imprisoned. The combined fine and bail that was set for his release was 600 yuan, a fee that an entire Li village would have difficulty paying, let alone an individual or a family.
By the time of Zhenghe’s imprisonment, Wang Guoxing had risen to a position of respect in the surrounding region. Unlike his father, he did not have any official position of authority, but he was renowned for his skill as a craftsman and leader of hunting parties. He helped plan harvests and food storage, and oversaw rituals and celebrations. From his teens, in the early republic, he had worked as a porter for Han merchants who did business in Li territory. His physical prowess also set him apart, gained carrying mighty loads of salt and kerosene on his back. For this work, he earned 2 yuan for three days’ work. While his father had squandered money on opium, Wang Guoxing saved his earnings. In 1920, when Guoxing was twenty-six years old, he had saved up his wages to celebrate the wedding of his younger brother. On the day of the feast, Wang presented his brother with the lavish gifts he had purchased, bringing them out one by one: wine for the occasion, bags of rice, and finally, a pig. Before he could finish presenting the gifts, however, a local official who had gotten wind of the festivities, entered the village with his retinue for an inspection. He left with the wine, the rice, and the pig.48
Fifteen years later, in 1935, Wang Guoxing needed to raise 600 yuan for his father’s freedom. By borrowing from acquaintances and selling all that he had, Wang raised the 600 in several months, and he paid the fee. But even after accepting the fee, the authorities would not release Wang Zhenghe. It was obvious that the astronomical fee had been intended to keep Zhenghe in prison and to prevent him from organizing the Li in protest. Finally, after languishing in prison for three years, Wang Zhenghe became gravely ill, and he was released in 1938. A few days later, he was dead. His wife, also aged at the time, died several days after him.
From the high Qing through the early Republican period, Li leadership positions were hereditary. Passing of leadership duties and privileges from father or mother to son or daughter (for it was not uncommon for Li women to hold prominent leadership roles) had been a characteristic of Li society for centuries, and it was in the Kangxi reign of the eighteenth century that the Qing state recognized this hereditary practice in its dealings with the Li.49 During the Republican period, small local elections were encouraged by the Hainan and Guangzhou authorities, as an attempt to break with this old system. This new policy was promulgated as a modernizing break with traditional practices. Still, when Wang Zhenghe died shortly after his release from prison, the inhabitants of Hongmao and surrounding villages expected his son, Wang Guoxing to take over his father’s position.50
Wang Guoxing’s name was put forward for the position, but he was reluctant to accept it. His fellow villagers implored Wang to take the position, but before the matter was resolved, following a quick election, another Li headman of the same surname took Wang Zhenghe’s vacant post. This man was not as popular, and the calls continued for Wang Guoxing to take over his father’s post. Guoxing’s popularity drew the interest of Nationalist authorities, and expecting to be similarly detained, a few months after his parents’ death, Wang disappeared from the village. For an entire year, he stayed away from Hongmao, living alone in the mountain forests. While he was gone, an official election was held in the villages, and Wang Guoxing was chosen to represent them. Wang Guoxing had not communicated with the people of his village for a year, but they knew that he was living somewhere in the surrounding forests. The people of Hongmao then began walking into the forests each day, calling his name, imploring him to return to the village and take up his post. “Guoxing!” they called, while combing through the forest in groups, “Please come back and lead us! You are our leader!”51
By that time it was summer of 1941. During Wang’s absence from the village, the Japanese had occupied the Hainanese coast, and they held strategic areas of the inland. The surviving Nationalist leaders and forces had retreated to the island’s interior. Their weapons were their only significant assets, and these they used to extract their material needs from the Li people. While the Nationalists were far better armed than the Li, they were also desperate for food and shelter, and for this they relied on Li cooperation or at least nonconfrontation.
Nationalist reinforcements were not forthcoming, and Li scouts easily assessed their strengths in preliminary planning for an anti-Nationalist uprising. The Nationalists were also beset by hostile Communist guerrillas who had long held a position of some strength in the island’s sparsely populated southeast, surrounding Lingshui. In the midst of hostile Li, Communist, and Japanese forces, the Nationalists in Hainan’s southern interior still pursued a policy of ongoing suppression and exploitation of the Li. By the official count of the current Hainan government, as well as the authoritative history of the Li people by a leading scholar, the Nationalists killed more than ten thousand Li and Miao people in the region between 1940 and early 1943.52
Wang Guoxing heard his fellow villagers calling his name as they walked through the forest, imploring him to return and lead them. He must have known that in the past year, the Nationalist numbers in the surrounding region had increased, and that any position of leadership had become far more treacherous for a Li headman. Still, he answered his neighbors, and returned to Hongmao to take up his father’s position. Three days later, Wang received an order from the Nationalist authorities demanding that he turn over 120 yuan and nine men for conscription. He was also ordered to contribute an unspecified amount of livestock. This would be Hongmao’s monthly obligation, and Wang Guoxing would be held personally responsible for delivering every month.53
Nationalist pressure on the people living in the Li territories had reached a breaking point. The Japanese occupation had led to execution, massacre, and mass conscription of the Li, but in Wang Guoxing’s southern mountainous region of the island, the extractions and the massacres at the hands of the newly arrived Nationalist forces drew the most fury and resistance. In one record of early meetings in the planning of the Li uprising, one of the Li leaders even entertained the possibility of striking some kind of deal with the Japanese that would allow them to fight the Nationalists together. While the Japanese mining projects and harbor construction proceeded apace, their political priorities on Hainan had diminished.
There had been sporadic and spontaneous anti-Japanese uprisings among the Li, including one in April of 1939, just weeks after the Japanese arrival on Hainan. The leader of the thirty-man group of southern Li, Tang Tianxiang, was captured and executed, and the uprising was quelled.54 Otherwise, Li resistance to the Japanese, while sometimes fierce, was limited to smaller uprisings, usually involving several dozen fighters from a single village. Involvement by dozens and sometimes hundreds of Li individuals in the Communist resistance to the Japanese was also common, notably in battles around the Zhongtianling base area on the island’s southern coast.55 But in the early years of the Japanese occupation of the island, and the Nationalist fortification of the southern highlands, there were no massive and coordinated Li uprisings against either occupying presence.
Up until this point in Hainan’s history, the Li people had been involved in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of uprisings against the people who tried to control the island and dictate their policy. There were several major uprisings of the Li in the final years of the Qing dynasty. One of the largest of these came in 1897, and appears to have involved an alliance between the Han and Li peoples against Qing forces and involved more than four thousand Li fighters.56 It is not evident that the Li people’s uprisings were affiliated with any secret societies or piracy in this time, nor do the Li uprisings seem to have been sparked by nationalistic motives in concert with Han anti-Manchu revolutionary activities. There was occasionally an affiliation between the Li and Ming loyalists during the uprisings of the early Qing, but this seems to have been an alliance of convenience against the new Manchu rulers.
The Nationalist forces that operated on Hainan were not recruited or conscripted locally, but came to the island as fully formed units. It is not likely that any Li served with these forces except in noncombat roles. The same was obviously true of the Japanese forces, though their smaller numbers forced them to rely on local police forces. The Communist force on Hainan, however, was almost completely constituted of local Hainanese people. In regions where the Li made up a significant portion of the population, some of them had joined the Communists. The earliest and most important example of this before 1943 was in Lingshui county, very early in the development of the Hainan Communist movement. Lingshui is on the southern coast of the island, east of the harbors of Sanya and Yulin. During the late Qing, a British observer who was mapping the island’s coast had noted that the Li people of this region were more reclusive than those of other regions, and that when Han or foreigners had come in contact with them, hostilities had been more frequent than with the Li of other regions.57
Half a century later, as noted in the previous chapter, Lingshui saw a growth of local rural autonomy among peasants, and local militias were influenced and sometimes controlled by the Hainan Communists. The Nationalist government sanctioned peasant associations in 1926, and in Lingshui these included a mixture of Li and Han, who had shared regional and economic interests.58 After the spring 1927 purge of leftists and Communists within the Nationalist Party, Lingshui became an important destination of the Communists who survived the purge on Hainan. While the militias and guerrilla Communist forces around Lingshui included both Li and Han fighters, this was not a Li movement, organized by Li headmen or in the tradition of Li collective uprisings. It would, however, serve as a foundation for later cooperation between the Hainan Communists and the Li fighters, including one of the Baisha Uprising leaders referring to Lingshui as proof that the Communists were willing to work closely with the Li.59
In the late 1930s, a Li commander, Zhou Tangzhen, who was also a Communist Party member, helped to establish communications and spy networks that allowed the Communists to monitor Nationalists movements. Lingshui had initially been a relatively safe place for the growth of the Hainan Communist movement in cooperation with some of the local Li population, but in the 1930s it was too dangerous for anything other than underground organization. Lingshui was close to Yulin, which the Japanese authorities developed as a modern harbor under the Japanese occupation.
With the Nationalist retreat from the Japanese, the Li were faced with a new kind of total threat that was not avoidable by further retreat into the mountains. The healthiest and most able-bodied of the Li fighters could live in the mountain forests and survive for a time in a guerrilla existence, but it would not be possible to exist in their settled village communities until the Nationalists had withdrawn from their territory. Within days of taking up his position as a local leader, Wang Guoxing began to organize meetings. Arrowheads were circulated, as they had been for centuries, signaling that a council was to be held. There was no hierarchy in this process. There was no obedience to a great leader of the Li people that was demanded by this communication, but all knew that it indicated a communal desperation, and any who failed to answer this summons would have new mortal enemies—failure to appear at such a gathering was tantamount to a declaration of open hostility to the group assembled.60
Leaders of the Miao people were also invited to this meeting, and the fate of the two peoples was joined in their plans. The meeting was held in secret, high in the mountains. The leaders who were assembled swore mutual loyalty and sealed their oath in drinking wine mixed with the blood of a chicken. The meeting took place in June of 1942, and Wang Guoxing was still officially newly in the service of the Nationalist government.61 The planning that took place for the Li uprising was slow and deliberate, though there is no written record of how it took place. Wang Guoxing sent written communications to leaders from other villages, including those of the Miao people, but these notes are no longer extant.
The numbers of participants and casualties in the Baisha Uprising vary throughout the sources that I have consulted. Taking the smallest of any set of figures, however, still makes the Baisha Uprising one of the most important events in Hainan’s history, and an unprecedented Li movement that would play an important part in deciding the island’s modern fate. Ultimately, it was between twenty- and thirty thousand Li fighters that joined the Baisha Uprising in the late summer of 1943. Kunio Odaka, a Japanese observer of the Li, visited the region bordering Baisha on the eve of the uprising, and estimated that the population of a single average Li village was about 155 men, women, and children.62 Accounting for the elderly and children, and the fact that Li women were not traditionally involved in warfare, this means approximately 60 fighters might have joined the uprising from any given village. With these rough figures, it can be assumed that the Baisha Uprising involved an astounding 350 villages in Li territory, and coordinated their military efforts. Odaka’s description of Baisha, observed in 1942, foreshadowed the events that would come in the following year.
[Baisha], which is the gathering center for the Li of this area, is said to have a moat constructed behind its bamboo wall. It is also said that there are dirt walls with holes for rifles. However [the valley] does not have such formidable defense units; some units do not have fences, and some do not even have an entrance to the village. … On the whole the villagers were docile and showed no sign of enmity. They get along well with our soldiers too.63
Beginning simply with the smaller figure of twenty thousand Li fighters already makes the case for the unprecedented nature of this uprising in Li history, and in Hainan’s history. The real significance is naturally in the way that this uprising was brought about, how it was planned, and what motivated participation. Wang Yujin, like Wang Guoxing, was a prominent Li leader, and he was one of Guoxing’s earliest collaborators in the planning of a coordinated action against the Nationalist forces that had settled in Li territory. A native of the same Hongmao region, Yujin had been conscripted by the Nationalists as a young man and taken to fight on the mainland. He had later deserted and returned home to Hainan, and to Hongmao. In an early 1942 meeting between Wang Guoxing and Wang Yujin, they discussed the possibilities of an uprising in their home region of Hongmao, where there were relatively few Nationalist troops at that time. Wang Yujin said:
If we deal with the traitors [guozei, meaning the Nationalist forces] in our home of Hongmao of course it would be easy. But the traitors’ forces are all mutually connected, and in Baisha County their military strength is several thousand. Our Hongmao forces would not be enough to defeat them all. The forces of all of our townships must also become mutually connected.64
Wang Yujin’s observations suggest that any connectedness throughout the Li community would require active organization, and the Wangs could not count on broad participation without a significant summoning. The localized uprisings of previous periods were often prompted by individual incidents in which an aggressive official or a greedy merchant had caused some offense in a Li village or township. In such an instance, some Li fighters would be summoned to respond to this, often with a guerrilla attack on some government or merchant convoys, or, occasionally, with a direct attack on a neighboring Han village or official fortification. In 1942, Wang Yujin and the rest of the Baisha Li community were presented with a new challenge following the Japanese invasion, however, when the Nationalists retreated into their territory with a troop strength in the thousands and far superior weaponry including machine guns and artillery. While morale was perhaps low among the Nationalists, their military superiority was beyond question, and any Li attack that hoped to be successful would need a force that was far superior in numbers.
Wang Yujin’s experience with the Nationalist military had taught him that it was not the loosely cobbled forces of the waning Qing or the early republic, and he shared this with Wang Guoxing. Vertical loyalty and a sense of the national mission infused the officer corps of the Nationalist military with an unprecedented nationalism, and Yujin knew that the forces that had arrived in Hongmao and the rest of Li territory would not simply try to hold a town on their own, but would react to any uprising as a single unit, retracting into an area of defensive strength and then counterattacking. It was this perception that led Wang Yujin to the conclusion that the Li would have to unite and similarly act as a disciplined military force.
It was this negative impetus of the Nationalists that led the Li people to unite and rise in response to the new threat to their people and territory. The threat was unprecedented, and the response would bring an unprecedented unity of purpose for the Li people. Even while Wang Guoxing and Wang Yujin planned their uprising, scattered preparations for smaller Li uprisings were already underway. The leadership of Wang Guoxing, Wang Yujin, and others would bring together at least twenty thousand fighters, and this figure was built on the widespread discontent and military preparedness that the Nationalist presence had already begun to fuel among the Li in the southern highlands. After a meeting of Li leaders in June of 1942, Wang Guoxing personally walked around the region for two months, and found that in hundreds of other villages, weapons were being consolidated, and preliminary preparations had begun. Volunteers had already voiced their eagerness to join an uprising against the Nationalists, and even by his own account, Wang Guoxing did not personally conceive of and execute the uprising. By August of 1942, Wang hosted another meeting, this time with fifty representative leaders of the region. Reporting on progress that had taken place since the June meeting, they found that they had twelve thousand flintlock rifles, and thousands of spears and bows. Most importantly, Wang Guoxing received reports that thirty thousand fighters would join the fight against the Nationalist forces. As they toasted and sealed their alliance with rice wine and rooster blood, some of those present proclaimed that there was no way they could lose.65
The actual violence of the Baisha Uprising itself was brief, taking place mainly between July 12 and July 17, 1943. About seven major engagements took place throughout Baisha county, centered around the county seat of Baisha. Initially, following the surprise Li attacks, the Nationalist officers in the county seat abandoned their posts and fled. The early days of the uprising brought some optimism for the Li. Wang Guoxing was asked to attend an emergency meeting with a Baisha district leader who might offer his help. It was a trap and Wang was captured, leading Wang Yujin to assemble a squad of men to rescue him. Ten Nationalists were killed in the rescue, the first casualties of the uprising around Hongmao. According to Wang Guoxing’s biography, of the one hundred or so Nationalist forces in the region surrounding Hongmao, all but a handful of deserters were killed.66 The fighting continued throughout the region, but as the initial surprise wore off, the Nationalists were able to regroup. Within a matter of days, the superior weaponry of the Nationalist forces had them in control again.
In the aftermath of the initial action of the Baisha Uprising, the killing still continued. The Nationalists sent Li spies into the mountains to infiltrate the remnants of the forces that had taken part in the uprising. Before the groups could reconstitute themselves, the Nationalists had inserted their agents into several Li fighting units, and from there, espionage ensued, including assassination of the most prominent leaders using methods such as poisoned wine that was drunk, ironically, in honor of the dead. But the Li fighters that had retreated into the mountains also had their own agents among the Li villages. When they reported to their leaders in the mountains, they told them that the Nationalists had resettled the Li villages in force and in preparedness. Any attempt to return to their homes was too dangerous. Their one chance at an overwhelming surprise attack had been spent, and it had not eliminated the Nationalist threat. Now there seemed little hope of resuming the conflict without some kind of help.67
The Nationalists’ efforts to mop up the Li threat to their presence in the island’s interior were successful in many instances, as Li headmen fell one after another. Some fell to assassination or execution, the latter fate being brought upon dozens of fighters or suspected fighters in one day. In one instance, more than 150 Li men were executed in one day in a single town. Other Li leaders surrendered to the Nationalists, turning over valuable weapons and some of the fighters that had been under their command.68 In Wang Guoxing’s home township of Hongmao, the population before the uprising was nearly ten thousand. By the time of the 1947 census, less than four years later, the population had dropped to about two thousand. The elimination or displacement of nearly four fifths of the Hongmao population is attributed to the Nationalist response to the Baisha Uprising. Wang felt the effect and the viciousness of the response in his own family. Nationalist forces took his two daughters. One of them was drowned and the other sold to a man in another village, though she was reunited with her father following the Communist takeover of Hainan in 1950. Nine of his male cousins took part in the uprising, and three were killed.69
The prospect of Li extermination now was more real than ever to some of the leaders of the uprising. Under Wang Guoxing and Wang Yujin’s leadership, the Li fighters continued to retreat farther and farther into the mountain wilderness. Many of the Li people had come to live by agriculture, and not simply by subsistence hunting and gathering. The scarcity of food to be hunted and foraged in the mountain forests along with the obvious danger of such an organized unit made it impossible for the Li fighters to remain together as a fighting force. While some villagers secretly made their way into the mountains to feed the fighters, only a minority of expert woodsmen were able to survive alone in the wild forests.
This contradicts the misnomer of “wild” that has been attributed to the Li of Hainan. Long hunting trips had given only some Li men the skills they needed to survive in the woods without returning to their home villages. This was a kind of sport that the men engaged in during the New Year’s festival, and often with the added amusement and challenge of intoxication. But irrigated agriculture made up most of the Li diet, not wild vegetation and game. After less than two months in the mountain forests, Wang Guoxing watched the desperation of hunger take its toll on the fighters who had hoped to follow him to the end. Finally he announced that those who could not subsist in the woods were to return to their villages. He told them that their chances of survival were better if they could gradually and secretly return to their homes. The risk of discovery and execution by the Nationalists was great, but the alternative was certain starvation in the unwelcoming mountain forests. Reluctantly, most of the Li force returned to their homes, where, they were told, they would receive instructions once the leadership had decided on the next move of the uprising.
By October 1943, another meeting was held that brought together most of the remaining leaders of the movement. None of the fighters who had come this far entertained the possibility of surrender to the Nationalists. According to later accounts of the events, it was Wang Yujin who first put forth the decision to turn to the Hainan Communists at this point. Since the events, and since the Li uprising has been entered into the annals of Communist history, rather exotic versions of the decision to turn to the Communists for help have emerged.
You Qi, a mainland journalist who came to the island in the spring of 1950, did his part to build this magical tale of the Li people being led to the Communists by their own superstitions and omens. Wang Guoxing, in this version, had heard of the Red forces on Hainan, and he and others were entertaining the possibility of turning to them for help against the Nationalist forces. Early one morning, in a moment of introspection and meditation on the matter, a red mist came to him from over the hills, descending on his camp from the north, where the Communists were known to be operating with the greatest strength. At this point, in this retelling, there was no more doubt of what was the best course of action, and Wang sent out messengers to find the leaders of the Communists.70
Actually, in Wang Guoxing’s own biographical account, which relies on the recollections and eye-witness accounts of participants in the events rather than the fanciful exoticism of a revolutionary travel journalist, it was Wang Yujin who suggested that the best decision for the embattled Li was to seek out the help of the Communists. Yujin remembered the popularity of the Communists during his time serving in the Nationalist military in the southern mainland. He recounted this to the other Li leaders, and he also told them what he knew of the Han-Li cooperation in the Communist revolutionary base that had been established in Lingshui. This southeastern base had since been greatly weakened, and the Baisha Li fighters could not simply make their way to Lingshui. They would have to seek out the Communists in the northern part of the island. But cooperation between the Communists and the Li was not unprecedented, Yujin urged, and for those with him it would be the best step for them to go to the Communists next.71
The alliance between the Li under the leadership of Wang Guoxing, Wang Yujin, and others, with the Hainan Communists was the most important political result of the Baisha Uprising. The statistics surrounding the events vary with some predictability, depending on the source. There are some localized accounts that are probably more accurate than the figures that are attributed to the entire uprising, but there is not a systematic compilation of local histories that might be cobbled together to provide an accurate set of statistics on the uprising. In terms of the participation of Li fighters, the two figures used most consistently are twenty- and thirty thousand. The significantly larger figure of thirty thousand is found in the accounts that rely on the recollections and eye-witness accounts of the Li participants. The figure of twenty thousand occurs more often on the whole, and it is found in the secondary accounts of Hainan’s revolutionary history. It is notable that in the accounts where the Li struggle is central, the figure of thirty thousand is used, and where the Communist revolution is central, the twenty thousand figure is more common. Nationalist casualties are similarly divided between these two types of sources, and the figures most commonly used are three hundred and eight hundred, used together with the larger and smaller of the Li participation figures, respectively. These two sets of figures (twenty thousand Li fighters and three hundred Nationalist casualties, and thirty thousand Li fighters and eight hundred Nationalist casualties) appear together in all instances I have found.72
Another important variation in the many accounts of the Baisha Uprising is the treatment of the movement’s preparation. In the accounts that do not take the Li as the center of the narrative, there is little or no attention to the early preparations and meetings of the Li and Miao headmen that began more than a year before the uprising was launched. This oversight may be explained by a general lack of attention to detail in these accounts of the uprising, but I believe that the discrepancy between these accounts and the Li accounts is more important than simply a lack of detail. There are two conclusions that must be drawn when accurately conveying the context and the extensive planning with more thorough attention than is generally allowed in mainland or Communist accounts. First, the fact that the uprising was planned for more than a year with dozens of village and township headmen involved, completely changes the mainland or Communist understanding of the Li as a primitive people who were simply prodded by Nationalist or Japanese injustice and rose in a reflexive response. Second, the planning that was involved in the Li uprising sets it apart from the violent movements of the Li throughout imperial Chinese history and the early republican period.
In the Communist version of the Li uprising, it is the Li participation with another group—the Communists, themselves—that sets the movement apart from other Li disturbances. The Li sent messengers to establish contact with the Communist leadership in November and December of 1943, and by early 1944, the two groups had begun working together.
The arrival of the military work unit [in early 1944] was extremely moving for Wang Guoxing and the other leaders of the uprising. Wang Guoxing and Wang Yujin … said, “After hoping day and night, our parental army (fumu jun) has finally arrived. The sun has risen over Wuzhishan!” The arrival of this work unit caused the Baisha Li people’s resistance movement to come under the leadership and organization of the Chinese Communist revolutionary movement.73
It is correct in that the Li had never before collaborated with another force consistently in an attempt to expel a common enemy. The exception of the Ming loyalists in the early Qing dynasty is notable, but it is not well documented, and it does not seem to have been widespread within the Li community.74 While the above description is perhaps overly dramatic in its propagandistic tone, the extensive Li-Communist cooperation was indeed the ultimate result of the Baisha Uprising. The initiative for the cooperation came from the Li themselves, and the resulting alliance was quickly welcomed by the Communists. Attempts had already been underway on the part of the Communists to establish good relations with the Li. A July 1940 directive from the mainland Communist Party headquarters instructed the Hainan Communist leadership to pursue an alliance with the Li.
Conduct your work vigorously in establishing alliances with the 300,000 Li people. Respect their customs and rituals. Earn their trust, do not allow them to be used by the enemy, and bring them into our resistance movement. You must recognize that their ancestral home territory surrounding Wuzhishan is the last refuge that we might be able to use as a last resort in our resistance. … It is only with access to this region that we can carry out a long-term resistance.75
The Communist priority of establishing an alliance with the Li reflected their understanding of the importance of the Li dominance in the island’s interior. In a sense, the Li uprising played perfectly into the hands of the Communists. There are some references to Communist influence in the planning of the uprising, but these come only in secondary sources that provide triumphalist accounts of the Communist struggle, and they are dubious and not verifiable. Zhan Lizhi was a Li member of the Communist movement and served under Wang Guoxing. He remembered his service with Wang after the initial violence of the Baisha Uprising had subsided, and after the alliance with the Hainan Communists. Zhan’s work with Wang was to subvert the functioning of the Nationalist government that remained in power in the region. According to Zhan, Wang Guoxing knew of pathways and trails through the mountains around Wuzhishan that it seemed no other person ever knew about. To Zhan, it seemed that Wang could summon trails as if he were drawing them on a map with his own hand as he ran through the forest. During the Baisha Uprising, many Li men, women, and children had fled to the mountains to escape the violence. Following the uprising, the Nationalists returned to the area and began propaganda work, according to Zhan, which was sometimes successful in building mistrust of the Communists among the Li. Following the Nationalist propaganda campaign, there was some reluctance on the part of the Li who had fled, to return to their villages. Again, Wang is credited with much of the ideological work that was required to reestablish unity among the Li in the region, and encourage some of those who had fled to return to their villages.76
For two years, the Li continued to frustrate the Nationalist occupation of their territory, now with the guerrilla training and experience of the Communists. Ties to the Communist movement in the north became stronger, and the alliance of convenience would benefit the Communists most when the Nationalists withdrew from Li territory in August of 1945. The Japanese surrender and withdrawal from the island was followed by the Nationalists’ return to the cities and an attempt to reestablish control. For the Communists, access to the refuge of the southern mountains allowed them to subsist beyond the Nationalists’ reach for the next five years as they gradually expanded their bases throughout the rest of the island.