HOLDING ALOFT HAINAN’S RED FLAG
Disobedience and Survival in the Civil War, 1946
In 1945, in the wake of the Japanese defeat and withdrawal, on the national scale, even during the halting negotiations between the Nationalists and the Communists, the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) “seemed, at this time, to be absolutely sure of victory through force.” There were some sticking points in the peace talks, however, and it was not certain that the Communists were ready or willing to make the concessions demanded of them by the Nationalists, and the Communist leadership seemed divided. Through the fall and winter of 1945–1946, the pantomime of peace brought hope to American observers and negotiators, including General George C. Marshall, who hoped to overcome the crucial step of joining all Chinese military bodies into a single national force. President Harry Truman declared the American position that would be Marshall’s marching orders as negotiator: “autonomous armies should be eliminated as such and all armed forces in China integrated effectively in the Chinese National Army.”1 American policy was officially to withhold assistance that would be used by the Nationalist government against the Communists in a civil war, but that did not preclude logistical aid and extensive cooperation. Noncombat military and intelligence missions were carried out in cooperation between the Nationalists and the Americans. The complex and ultimately doomed process proceeded but with few moments of satisfaction for any of the players.
On Hainan, Feng Baiju and the Communists entertained the possibility of again working with the Nationalists, but they had cause to extend little trust toward the group that had opposed national directives for unity, from the capture of Feng in 1937 to the continual skirmishes. The blame for some of these clashes after 1937 could be traced to both Nationalist and Communist forces, but the Communist leadership would later be persecuted by the mainland Communist regime for being too cozy with their Nationalist neighbors, and too eager to support the united front. The shifting alliance was difficult to track on the mainland where communications were largely free flowing, but on Hainan it was impossible for Feng to keep up-to-date on the shifting nuance of the united front. Now at the time of the Japanese defeat, the Hainan Communists were out of contact with the mainland Communist authorities in Yan’an, and for months thereafter, they were unable to safely establish radio contact with the mainland. When an Australian official asked Zhou Enlai, for example, in early 1946, about the possibility that missing Australian servicemen might have escaped Japanese prisoner of war camps on Hainan and joined with the Communists guerrillas, Zhou could not give him a definitive response. Zhou’s letter of May 14, 1946, is worth quoting in its entirety to reflect the CCP’s awareness, or lack of awareness, of the Hainan Communists at that time:
Dear Mr. [Patrick] Shaw:
Your letter of April 27th was received. We have immediately taken necessary steps to obtain the report on the Australian prisoners of war in Hainan Island. However, since the recent conditions of the Communist-led forces in Hainan Island under General Fung Pak-kee [Feng Baiju] have close connection with the Australian prisoners of war in the area around [Danxian] as mentioned in your letter, we like to make the following statement:
1. General Fung Pak-kee’s units have fought for eight years against the Japanese under extremely difficult circumstances, have done many meritorious deeds. But just because of the very fact that General Fung Pak-kee and his units have accepted the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, they not only have been ill treated by Kuomintang [Guomindang, Nationalist Party] who have denied their achievement in these years and refused to recognize their due position, but also were openly branded as “bandits.” Recently the Kuomintang has massed a force of an army with 4 divisions to besiege General Fung’s units. Fighting is still going on.
2. Under the circumstances of civil war in Hainan Island the connection between us [the Communist leadership on the mainland] and General Fung Pak-kee’s units in [Danxian] becomes extremely difficult, since we never have any air communication with General Fung in ordinary times. So it is hard to estimate the time needed for informing General Fung to protect and send out the Australian prisoners of war; as to the safeguard for these prisoners of war in case they venture to break through the blockade of KMT troops, we hope that you, on behalf of your legation, can negotiate with Generalissimo’s [Chiang Kai-shek] Canton Headquarters. Nevertheless we will try every possible effort we can to search for the whereabouts and other information of these prisoners of war. If we get any information from General Fung Pak-kee, we will let you know as soon as we can.
Faithfully yours,
Chou En-lai [Zhou Enlai]2
The disconnection between the Hainan Communists and the mainland was such that even the mainland command could not portray themselves as being in control of all Communist base areas throughout China. Interacting with foreign government’s with such an appeal as the one above, the Communist leadership frankly explained that the Hainan Communists were outside of their control. While they shared a common cause, they could not communicate with or command them. A small American unit of officers parachuted onto Hainan just a few days after the Japanese surrender. Their mission was an “OSS [Office of Strategic Services] Mercy Mission POW rescue.”3 The various Chinese missions of this sort were code-named: Magpie to Beijing, Sparrow to Shanghai, Flamingo to Harbin, and so on. Hainan’s was Mission Pigeon. There were other missions throughout the region with similar tasks: Raven to Vientiane, Laos; Eagle to Korea; and Quail to Hanoi.4 Even in the weeks after the Japanese surrender, these missions began to show the fissures that would lead to the monolithic blocks of Cold War alliances. Historian, Maochun Yu wrote about Mission Quail, in Vietnam, Hainan’s neighboring country to the east, asserting that these OSS missions explicitly eschewed political ideology in their inception and objective. After working with archival sources on these missions, Yu believes that it is obvious that the OSS missions were not launched as a propaganda coup, though making political pawns of POWs was not unheard of. Still, Yu notes, Mission Quail ran into political trouble when picking up French POWS from a Japanese camp. These French servicemen “were not necessarily friendly toward the Vietnamese Communists” prior to their internment by the Japanese, and Ho Chi Minh’s followers did not welcome the American OSS working to evacuate them without a reckoning, which caused an international fracas among Japan’s erstwhile enemies.5
The ongoing hostilities between the Chinese Communists and Nationalists amidst the Japanese occupation would cause some trouble on Hainan’s OSS mission as well. The officer in charge of carrying out Hainan’s Mission Pigeon, Captain John Singlaub, wrote, “Our orders were to make contact with Allied POWs in our respective areas, take the prisoners under our protection, and render all possible medical and humanitarian assistance to them.”6 Captain Singlaub (operating with the temporary rank of major), was concerned with non-Chinese “Allied” POWs, such as the Dutch, Indian (Sikhs from the Hong Kong-Singapore Royal Artillery), and Australians, as well as American airmen who had been shot down and were being held in Japanese camps on the island. Singlaub’s observations and recollections from this mission provide a unique picture of a newcomer to the island in the late summer of 1945. (In 1981, after duty in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Singlaub went on to become a founder of the American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He was also an early member of the Central Intelligence Agency, and during the Reagan administration worked for the “Contras” against the Nicaraguan government. One should keep Singlaub’s career in mind when reading his account of the situation between the Hainan Communists and Nationalists published in 1991.) He was the first American whose presence on Hainan is recorded in this period. The American Presbyterian missionaries who had made Hainan their home for decades earlier in the century were gone now, and had been for nearly four years.7
On August 27, 1945, the C-47 plane of Mission Pigeon left Kunming for Hainan to drop the squad of fewer than ten men, consisting of several Americans, including a medic, “a damn good weapons man” with a Thompson machine gun, and an intelligence officer, as well as a Chinese Nationalist lieutenant, and a young Japanese-American lieutenant as interpreter. Adding a Nationalist officer and no Communist representative to the group in this period was hardly unusual, and it reflected the ongoing and unbroken cooperation between Washington and the Nationalists.
Singlaub had his hands full leading a drop of inexperienced men into Japanese Hainan. Some of the men had never jumped from a plane before, and in the minutes after the drop they were still nursing bloody chins and concussions, and tending to broken supply crates when two Japanese army trucks approached them across the open field. Captain Singlaub quickly took charge of the situation, issuing orders to the small group of Japanese soldiers to defend his supplies and his men from a group of Chinese villagers who were watching the curious scene unfold. The uneasy relationship between Singlaub and the Japanese officers and prison guards, and the tricky negotiations with them that he undertook, are the focus of his recollection. But in the captain’s observations as he drove across the island to the prison camps, he conveys a sense of the atmosphere of Hainan in the weeks after the Japanese surrender. He and his squad rode across the island in Japanese trucks.
Japanese soldiers protected Singlaub’s men and their supplies from the onlooking Chinese villagers who, even according to Singlaub’s own account, seemed to pose no threat whatsoever. Naturally, as a result of this arrangement and in order to carry out the directives, the Japanese soldiers were not disarmed, for they were now in that vague and uncertain limbo between war and peace, and at the service of a handful of Americans who had forced their empire’s surrender on Hainan. Remarkably, the surrendered Japanese enemies of the Americans were thus dragooned and, in effect, trusted with armed military duties before any of the local Hainanese population was entrusted with such work. This striking detail is telling in how we should understand the isolation of the Hainanese conflict until this point, in which U.S. intelligence officers operating in that theater would sooner trust their Japanese enemy with armed guard duty rather than risk the uncertainty of local forces. Doubtless this command decision went far to alienate the Hainanese from the hasty Americans.
This little group reflected the political priorities of both the Americans and the Nationalist government at this time: the Japanese-American officer would interpret and ensure a smooth transition of power, the American military muscle and intelligence men reflected the importance Washington invested in China, and the Nationalist officer clearly reflected and anticipated the alliance that would attempt to isolate the Chinese Communists in this early postwar period. Before the Communists were able to capitalize on the gains that they had made under the Japanese occupation, it was essential to the Americans, the Chinese Nationalists, and also the Japanese, that the reins of power were passed off seamlessly to anyone but the Reds. It seemed that the entire postwar world was conspiring against the Chinese Communists, for on the mainland to the north even the Soviets were not as cooperative as Mao and the Communist leadership had hoped.8
In the example of Mission Pigeon, one ranking officer saw not only the Communists, but all Chinese, as less than worthy colleagues in the transition of power that followed the Japanese surrender. Captain Singlaub recalled with bilious relish, that this particular senior officer had carelessly crossed the line of protocol in warming up to the Japanese hosts on Hainan.
… Colonel Andrus had ordered all American officers to attend a formal dinner given by the senior Japanese staff … an affair that clearly transcended the bounds of “fraternization” as outlined in our orders. During the banquet, Andrus—who had never heard a shot fired in anger—toasted the enemy and announced that the Japanese had proved to be “a worthy foe,” and that the Americans were “deeply grateful for the cooperation” we’d received on Hainan, which was better, he added, than that he’d received from the Chinese, who were supposed to be our allies.9
When Singlaub confronted Andrus about the misguided affection he was showing to the perpetrators of such atrocities, the colonel retaliated by instructing the Japanese “to no longer obey orders from [Singlaub] or [his] officers.”10 While this petty behavior actually threatened the execution of a mission that was meant to save the lives of men, many of whom were desperately in the need of immediate medical attention, for our sake it shows the way in which Mission Pigeon reflected the larger political rifts that would develop into the Cold War. As one ascended the chain of command, political ideology tinted the decisions of military missions, and Colonel Andrus’s cozy relationship with the Japanese officers of Hainan anticipated the broader relationship between the United States and Japan that was born in this takeover.
While the Communists throughout the Chinese mainland were isolated by the chilly treatment and sometimes open hostility from their neighbors and from the newly arrived peacekeepers from the north and across the ocean, the isolation of the Hainan Communists was even more extreme. Peace talks were planned between the Communist and Nationalist leaderships, and there was talk of a joint government. But it was painfully obvious, even at this early stage in post-Japan China, that the southern Communists were surrounded by an array of powerful and unfriendly forces. Further, the priorities of the Chinese Communist Party at the time of the Japanese defeat were clearly in the north. The aim of CCP policy was to “extend the CCP strongholds in Manchuria, defend the party’s position in North China, and withdraw from indefensible areas in Central and South China.”11
Captain Singlaub, though accompanied by a Nationalist officer, was not tasked with any reconciliation between the Hainan Nationalists and Communists. With the Japanese marines still firmly in control of their prison camps and military bases in the weeks following the empire’s surrender, there would be no work to prevent the outbreak of the Chinese civil war on Hainan. After all, with both the Hainan Communists and Nationalists operating with guerrilla tactics across the island, it would not be easy to tell the difference between the two camps from Singlaub’s perspective, let alone bring the two sides to the negotiating table.
Singlaub himself was ultimately willing to work with both the Nationalists and the Communists on Hainan. As it turned out, he would have to.
Over the next few days we got definite word of several Allied evaders in the mountains. With [Nationalist Lieutenant] Peter Fong’s help, I drew up some handbills in English and Chinese, requesting contact with Allied personnel still in hiding. We tied these handbills to bottles of Atabrine [an antimalarial drug], and each bottle was attached to a twelve-inch pilot parachute. Then we took a C-47 ride around the island, dropping the messages into the village markets in the highlands, where we knew the guerrillas were located.12
In the final days of his mission on Hainan, he received word that a large group of Allied prisoners—Indian, Dutch, Australian, and American—were being held in a Nationalist guerrilla camp. Taking his colonel’s Jeep, Singlaub bounced up the mountain road to the camp, and made it through Communist territory without incident, to the amazement of Nationalist officers. Singlaub and his men spent the night in the Nationalist guerrilla camp, celebrating with liquor and song their victory over Japan. After bringing back the prisoners on the following day, Singlaub also received a note from an American pilot who was “holed up with the Communist guerrillas.” Surprisingly, Nationalist Lieutenant Fong was delegated to escort the American out of Communist territory, and he did so without incident.13Japan’s occupation of Hainan left the people of the island reeling as a result of the atrocities noted earlier, and the unsustainable economic steps taken by the military regime. As in the case of the Japanese occupation of South Korea and Taiwan, passionate debate rages over the economic benefits and the human cost of the Japanese occupation and colonization. For some who remember the Japanese occupation, or for those whose relatives or compatriots suffered and died at the hands of the Japanese, any discussion of economic infrastructural development for which the Japanese were responsible is tantamount to traitorous behavior.
While Japanese atrocities on Hainan island deservedly play a central role in any analysis of the occupation period, it is still worthwhile to examine some of the economic plans and efforts on the island in that period. Notably, while the Japanese purportedly planned for long-term occupation of Hainan, and eventually for the establishment of a full colonial governmental infrastructure, they never progressed past a military administration. And rather than moving toward a civilian colonial government, the reality of the Pacific War sapping the resources and administrative attention of the Japanese empire made the trend on Hainan toward a harsher and more draconian rule, as was noted during Captain Singlaub’s OSS mission to Hainan following the Japanese defeat. Singlaub, a young but experienced officer at the time, with the firsthand military experience of the worst atrocities in both the European and Asian theaters of World War II, wrote that life for the Hainanese people under the Japanese occupation was “absolute hell.”14
From February 1939 until August of 1945, the Japanese military mining and transportation developments had proceeded apace, but in a way that would not benefit the long-term growth of the local Hainanese economy. The two main developments—the southern naval ports and the inland iron mines—would not help Hainan’s postwar recovery, even if it had not been for the ensuing chaotic civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. The iron mines and the light rail that connected them to the southern ports were useless by 1945, for they had been largely mined out and their bounty sent to Japan for use in the development of the Japanese military and economy.15
As for the southern ports, no significant ship-building industry was developed here by the Japanese, and the harbor of Yulin was only useful for ships in transit, coming from Singapore to Hong Kong or Japan, or connecting to the Southeast Asian mainland. “Hainan had been a backwater in China, and Japan almost succeeded in drawing it fully into the economy of East Asia, where its geographical situation and rich resources should have earned it an important role.” Ultimately, as a result of Japanese military priorities in the Pacific Ocean and broken communications that endangered shipping to and from the island, “Hainan could no longer serve its new master with the resources it had to offer and thus became another isolated part of a defeated empire.”16
This role of being a neglected outpost of great potential at the margins of a crumbling regime was simply a return to Hainan’s pigeonhole. As long as Hainan has been ruled from without, viewed from without, and exploited from without, it has always been labeled a backwater. And as the Japanese retreated, even the political calculus at the dawn of the Cold War did not prompt any representatives of the powers except for Singlaub’s Mission Pigeon to visit Hainan. There were no Soviet advisers in Hainan to help with the takeover of the Japanese industry, as was the case in the Japanese colony of Manchukuo in northeastern China, and in North Korea. Figures on the forces of the Hainan Communists have generally been accepted by Chinese historians from a report that the Hainan Communist leadership sent to the mainland Communist headquarters, dated October 26, 1945. This message was carried by messenger to the mainland Party headquarters, because it was sent before the reestablishment of two-way radio contact. Lin Ping wrote to Zhou Enlai that there were about 5,000 Communist Party members on Hainan, a military force of more than 7,700 regulars in five detachments across the island and about 9,000 militia fighters throughout the counties.17 This last figure seems to be used with some flexibility, probably for the purpose of expressing an enhanced viability of the Hainan Communist forces to the mainland Communist leadership. And yet, Japanese sources credited the Communist presence on Hainan with having provided them far more trouble than the Nationalists, and while they estimated a lower number of Communists in total, the Japanese occupiers also acknowledged an active but politically unaffiliated Communist resistance on Hainan.18 It seems likely that Lin and the Hainan Communist leadership would claim these irregulars as their own, and probably it was a claim with some traction.
Two militia groups from different towns gave me some impression of their daily lives and interaction with the Hainan authorities. One militia member explained that he and his fellow supporters of the Communist movement were not constantly making trouble for the authorities in their hometown of Lincheng. Lincheng was a significant northwestern town, near enough to the coast for the Nationalists regime to occupy it solidly following the Japanese evacuation. As they were instructed, the Communist militia there operated underground, and did not engage in frequent and dangerous propaganda activity. The Communist militia members exchanged messages with various Communist agents throughout the island, and they would occasionally hold secret meetings. In the months following the Japanese retreat, a unit of Nationalist soldiers arrived in Lincheng with mainlander officers, making the work of the underground militia much more dangerous. But they went about their daily lives as best they could. Late in the afternoon they would stop working in the rice fields or tending to the mango, banana, and rubber trees, and gather to play volleyball late into the evening. Often the underground militia members would be on teams mixed with the handful of Nationalist soldiers and officers who were garrisoned in Lincheng.
The militia men I interviewed in another more remote village, Xianlai in Feng Baiju’s native Qiongshan county, told me that the fear of retribution from the growing Communist forces on the island prevented the militia men from being sold out to the Nationalist authorities. In Xianlai, the militia veterans I spoke with explained that while the Nationalists claimed to administer their little town, they almost never saw any representative of the Nationalist military or civilian government. The Japanese had come through the town violently, burning houses and murdering civilians, but they had not stayed to govern, much like their sporadic and terrifying presence in Feng Baiju’s hometown of Changtai.
In 1946, less than a year after the Japanese defeat, Hainan Communist fighters twice disobeyed orders from the mainland central Communist command to abandon their home island. In Hainanese Communist historical accounts, Feng Baiju and the Hainanese were proven correct in this decision, and Mao Zedong also retroactively approved of the decision to disobey the order to leave Hainan. From 1926 to 1946, the Hainanese Communist movement had turned from a group of students and newspapermen to hardened guerrilla fighters in the island’s interior. While this quite neatly parallels the development of the mainland Communist movement through the end of the 1930s, by 1946, the Hainanese Communists were an anomaly in the Chinese Communist movement. The mainland forces were becoming a conventional fighting force, and they were preparing to abandon their northwestern bases for the pitched battle in northern and central China.
On the Chinese mainland, the Japanese withdrawal meant that the two armies were on the eve of a conventional military civil war. The mainland Communists had passed through the days of guerrilla struggle when they clung to minor gains, desperate escapes, rearguard actions, and partisan victories. By early 1946, they were marshaling their forces in the north for a conquest in the north-to-south traditional expedition that had successfully established most Chinese dynasties of the past. Military and political command was becoming increasingly centralized, and there was an effort at consolidating the scattered base areas that had characterized an early stage of the Communist movement.
According to an agreement with the Nationalists, the mainland Chinese Communist central command would abandon all of their bases and holdings south of the Yangzi River. Following the Japanese defeat in August 1945, the Communists and Nationalists briefly engaged in peace talks, in the winter and spring of 1945–1946. The southern holdings of the Communists were negligible compared to the northern bases that they had built up during the war with Japan, so this concession of southern territories to the Nationalists was relatively easy for the Communist leadership. While there were some sticking points in the negotiations between the Communists and the Nationalists, there was no protest from the Communist negotiators over giving up their southern bases, which consisted mainly of the Dongjiang (East River) Column near the southern city of Guangzhou (Canton), and the Hainan Independent Column.
The Dongjiang Column followed their orders to abandon their former guerrilla territories, withdrawing to the Communist-held northern bases. When the civil war resumed in the summer of 1946, the Dongjiang Column continued to fight for the Communists from their new Shandong base area.19 When the Hainan Communists received a similar order to leave their southern territory and retreat to Shandong, they responded that they could not safely comply with the order, and they would not attempt it. In the fall of 1946 they refused to obey another directive from Party Central to retreat to the Southeast Asian mainland and join forces with Communists forces in Indochina.
With the August 1945 defeat of the Japanese military and the end of the Pacific War, the Japanese occupiers of Hainan handed over the command of the island to the Chinese Nationalist regime that was internationally recognized. Since 1941, there had been a Japanese civilian population of more than ten thousand, many of whom were technicians who left their work in the mines, factories, fields, and harbors to the Nationalist authorities who would largely allow any developments to go to waste in the four years of civil war that would follow.20
The Japanese administration of Hainan had been almost completely military, a “Special Military Government” under the Navy. For some Hainanese, cooperation with the Japanese led to imprisonment, execution, or a hasty departure from the island. Zhao Shihuan (1903–1960), the most prominent collaborator on Hainan, left with Japanese forces, living in Japan for several years. According to one account, Zhao followed the trials of some Hainan collaborators from Japan, and when he saw that some were receiving light sentences and others were being released from prison early by the Nationalist authorities, he decided to return home in 1947. A brief imprisonment of less than a year by Hainanese Nationalist authorities followed, after which he left the island for good, this time for British Hong Kong where he lived for the rest of his life, working as a university professor.21
But life in most Chinese towns and villages continued as it had during the war years and the Japanese occupation, with unrest, violence, and underground activities shaping the political landscape for Communist guerrillas and the Nationalist forces who tried to wipe them out. The Japanese departure allowed Nationalist forces to reassert themselves along the coast, and establish political control. Most larger towns saw an increase in Nationalist military presence, while villages continued to see relatively loose political control. The village of Xianlai is not far from the capital, Haikou. It was much smaller than the neighboring town of Lin’cheng, where the Nationalist presence was more obvious. On the mainland, peace talks were underway, but according to several of the Communist militia men of Xianlai that I spoke with, the news of the Japanese defeat did not bring hopes for a unified government with the Nationalists. Living a few villages away from the charred remains of Feng Baiju’s hometown, the villagers of Xianlai remembered that before the Japanese had arrived and burned the village and gang-raped its women, the Nationalists had executed many of the villagers for suspected affiliation with Feng and the Communists. Then under the Japanese occupation, it had been difficult to tell the difference between regular Nationalist forces and those that were collaborating with the Japanese and doing their bidding.
While on the mainland, the titans of the political realm were discussing a unity government, in Xianlai, the Communist militia men already knew that there would be no peace with the Nationalist rulers of Hainan. This memory was clear for the men I spoke with in Xianlai, even though they did not hold a hatred for their former Nationalist enemies. For the militia men of Xianlai and Lincheng, there was no respite while the Nationalists were still the masters of Hainan island.22
On the mainland, the way forward was not clear for China. Stalin was worried that the Soviets would be blamed for fomenting a civil war if he expressed enthusiastic support for the Chinese Communists, so instead he advised the continuation of the old and tattered United Front, and hastened to remove his own troops from China (laden with the spoils of Japanese industrialization—factory equipment that they brought back to Russia).23 The Japanese defeat and withdrawal led to an awkward period in which the Nationalists and the Communists wobbled on the brink of total war. For most of two decades since 1927, the two parties had been in open military conflict with each other, with military engagements continuing even during the Japanese occupation.
The Communists emerged from the war with Japan in 1945 having become a military force that the Nationalists would have to take seriously. In Hainan, the guerrilla struggle had hardened the resolve of a core of partisan fighters who were loyal to their commander, Feng Baiju. While the Hainan Communists had operated for nearly five years without radio contact with the central Communist leadership in northwestern Yan’an, they had survived with the red flag held high. Theirs was, and would remain, an unbroken history of resistance to both the Japanese and the Nationalist governments of Hainan. This was essential to their identity, and in 1950, the slogan heard around the island was, “For twenty-three years, the red flag never fell.” But in 1945, the Communists of Hainan were far from the masters of the island. Like their comrades on the mainland, the Hainan Communists had retreated to a relatively inaccessible region, in the mountainous forests and jungles of Hainan island. While the mountains of Hainan allowed the Hainan Independent Column to survive the war years with Japan, it also prevented regular contact with their mainland counterparts that might have been possible through closer interaction with the Nationalists. The Nationalist and Japanese military presence had isolated the Hainan Communists from any help from the mainland either in material or leadership.
The Communists and Nationalists on Hainan had been fighting since the Meihe Incident of December 1940, but with the Japanese surrender, there was nothing that would keep them from focusing all of their efforts on each other in an attempt to secure the strategic island for their respective camps. At the time of the Japanese surrender, both the Communists and the Nationalists had been forced to revert to guerrilla warfare. From most accounts, the stiffer resistance came from the Hainan Communists.24
The Hainan Communists had strengthened their hand during the Japanese occupation especially in their alliance with a confederation of Li villages following the Li Baisha Uprising of 1943. Feng Baiju and the Communist leadership felt that they were in a position to negotiate with the Nationalists as equals, and defeat them in battle if it came to that. This was the sentiment that prevailed in communications between the Hainanese Communist leadership and the mainland Party Central in the weeks and months following the Japanese defeat. Certainly the Japanese were a more efficient and deadly fighting force than the Chinese Nationalists, and the Communists had survived, in spite, or, more likely, because of, the Japanese occupation of the island. With 7,000 local cadres, 5,000 Communist Party members, 7,700 regular troops in the Hainan Communist military, and more than 9,000 militia fighters, the Hainan Communist movement was strong, and growing fast by 1946.25
American connections and support, both military and popular, were crucial to the Nationalists on Hainan and throughout the mainland. Incompetence and corruption in the political and military leadership of the Nationalists was part of the equation that made them rely heavily on U.S. aid. The Nationalists’ military capability on Hainan reflected the larger reality of the Chinese mainland at the end of the war with Japan. Lloyd Eastman, in his authoritative account of the Nationalist failure summed up the state of the Nationalists on the eve of their final showdown with the Communists: “During the latter half of the eight-year war with the Japan, the Nationalist army was in an advanced state of disintegration. … This exhaustion and decrepitude were to be of supreme significance, for the army was soon called upon to fight a civil war with the Communists.”26
On Hainan, there were peace talks held between the Communist and Nationalist forces in December of 1945 and again in January of 1946. Their expressed intention was to implement, at the local level, the fragile peace between the Nationalists and the Communists on mainland China, to halt any obvious preparations for civil war, and to implement a policy of a single, unified national military. This final aim had been only partially successful during the Japanese invasion and occupation, because the forces were never integrated and hostilities continued, most notably in the Meihe Incident. The “Haikou Negotiations” of 1945–1946 were attempted twice, but they did not get far. While they were underway, the Nationalist 46th Army was landing on Hainan’s shores and securing important cities and towns as the Japanese withdrew. The talks fell apart with little accomplished except an increased knowledge by each group of their opponent’s leadership and capabilities.27
One colorful anecdote emerged from the talks, and was remembered by the Hainan Communist delegate to the peace talks, Shi Dan. A high-ranking Nationalist officer approached Shi on the sidelines of the talks with an offer of covert cooperation that sounded too good to be true. This was Han Liancheng (1909–1984), commander of the Nationalist 46th army. Han informed Shi that he was in command of the army, and that he had made a secret agreement with Zhou Enlai to continue in this post while serving as a Communist agent. The Hainan Communist delegation did not trust Han’s appeal to be genuine, and feared it was a trap.28 Because there was still no direct and secure radio contact between the Hainan Communists and Party Central on the mainland, and also because Han was in no position to verify his claim and was not about to offer up the 46th on a platter, both sides chose to bide their time in mistrust.29 The lack of clear communication on this meant that Han Liancheng could not fully reveal himself as a Communist agent. In a December 1948 speech to the Hainan Communist military leadership, Feng Baiju still put Han Liancheng in the line of Nationalist militarists and dictators who had been defeated to date by the Hainan Communists.30 Han and the 46th left Hainan to fight in Shandong in the northeast of the mainland, and the Hainan Communists claimed this as a successful repulsion of the Nationalist onslaught.31
This crucial failure in communication could have been averted had Party Central made more of a priority of communication with the Hainan Communists. Perhaps Han’s overtures would have been met with an understanding of his personal history and his willingness to work with the Communists. This is merely speculation, but the intelligence and communication failure would lead to a resumption of hostilities on Hainan that paralleled developments in mid-1946 on the mainland. Before the Nationalist 46th Army of the Nationalists had left Hainan, the Hainan Column was badly outmatched by its force. February of 1946 brought news to Hainan that the Communist leadership had agreed to abandon all of their bases to the south of the Yangzi River, including the island.
When the Hainan peace talks broke down in January of 1946, hostilities had quickly resumed, with skirmishes erupting in February between the 46th and the Hainan Communists. Unofficially, though, hostilities had never truly ceased, at least beginning with the Meihe Incident of late 1940, which seems to closely reflect the New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941 in southern Anhui. Though the Nationalist military infrastructure was still staggering out of years of pounding from the Japanese military, their dominance over the Communists in the air and at sea was undeniable. The Nationalist authority on the island easily prevented the Hainanese Communists from moving significant numbers of troops or supplies across the Qiongzhou Strait. Secure contact between the Hainan Communists and Party Central was limited to messages carried by hand. The relief of Japanese defeat and withdrawal would not last long. Communist messengers would still have to travel carefully, always under assumed names and with false documents, to communicate with their mainland counterparts. After the winter of 1945–1946, the Hainan Communists were continuing to grow in strength and support. Their base areas were expanding, and with the help of the Li tribes, they were able to maintain strong bases beyond the reach of the other Nationalists.
When, in April of 1946, the central command of the Communist Party on the mainland issued an order for the Hainan Communist leadership and most of its political and military personnel to evacuate the island and make their way to the northern mainland, there was much confusion and resistance among the Hainan Communist leadership. From June of 1941 until September of 1946, the Communist leadership of Hainan had no radio communication with the mainland Chinese Communist headquarters in Yan’an. In that period, agents of the Hainan Communist movement attempted several times to procure the necessary instruments and operators to reestablish communications, but every effort ended in capture and execution.32 After the Japanese withdrawal from China in late 1945, Party Central in Yan’an stepped up its efforts to establish contact with its bases that had been behind Japanese lines or scattered throughout the country without communication. The fragile peace in late 1945 and early 1946 between the Nationalists and Communists offered a brief window for more open attempts at communication between the Party’s central command and its regional outposts. These base areas and underground militias proclaimed their loyalty to Yan’an, even if they had endured half a decade without hearing their commands in real time.
Party Central’s order to leave Hainan was sent out in the fall of 1945 and into the winter that followed, waiting to be picked out of the air by anyone affiliated with the Hainan Communist force. A repetitive message was sent specifically to the Hainan headquarters, naming its leader: “Comrade Feng Baiju. … Please use XX wavelength and XX call sign to communicate with us.”33 But without a two-way radio, it was impossible for the Hainan leadership to respond.
Feng and the Hainan Communist leadership could not afford to trust the tentative truce that prevailed on the mainland. As it had for twenty years, pragmatism drove the will to survive of the Hainan island Communists, and they were neither reckless nor overly trusting. There are only passing references to the importance of the medium of radio contact between the columns of the Chinese Communist movement in this period, though it was a vital lifeline that was maintained by trained personnel and at the cost of many lives. Between 1938 and 1940, the Yan’an headquarters of the Communist Party and the Eighth Route Army sent about eight hundred radio technicians to work with the Communist New Fourth Army.34 This was in a time of professed cooperation between the Communists and the Nationalists, and unified resistance to the Japanese. Following a series of military confrontations between the Communists and Nationalists in 1940 and 1941, logistics and technical aspects of the Communist military infrastructure suffered major setbacks.
Communist recruitment in technical schools was forced underground in the major cities. On Hainan, Huang Yunming, a radio technician, remembered a Nationalist raid in June of 1941 that ended the hope for Hainan’s ability to contact the mainland Communist headquarters. The commander of his unit of radio technicians was killed, causing a chaotic retreat in which their radio equipment was lost. For the next five years they continued to try to rig up a functional radio. There were no desks, let alone sophisticated equipment, and two timbers were roped together for a makeshift workspace. Huang remembered the tropical conditions with some humor, saying that the mosquitoes incessantly buzzing around their ears while they worked interfered with their concentration and their ability to hear signals from the mainland.35 Without help from Guangzhou or Hong Kong it was a hopeless task. So stripped was the island of functional communications that even the American OSS mission to Hainan, with the full cooperation from the Japanese occupation forces in the fall of 1945, had considerable difficulty establishing a wireless radio communication with their command.36
Hainan’s ability to relay messages of its progress back to the mainland was cut off, except for the occasional messenger who made the precarious trip through hostile territories controlled by either the Japanese or the Nationalists. Not only were there no wireless radio communications between the Hainan and mainland Communist leadership, Feng Baiju, the military and political leader of the Hainan Communist movement wrote very few directives in this time of any kind, and none of his speeches from this interim are extant. The communications sent from Hainan to the mainland headquarters, often handwritten directives carried by messengers, requested that more trained Communist cadres be sent to Hainan to aid in political and military leadership. Survival became the first order of business of the guerrilla, not ideological purity, and in the example of Hainan, not obedience to the national Communist movement.
The lack of radio contact between Hainan and the mainland Communist Party center was either the result or cause of a historical southward and westward orientation of Hainanese culture and economy. Hainanese native-place associations were common throughout Southeast Asia and Oceania urban centers, with frequent movement between Hainan and cities like Singapore and Manila. Even throughout the Japanese occupation, merchant networks that had been established centuries earlier continued to operate and allow movement from Hainan to the Southeast Asian mainland and other islands throughout the region. With the end of the Japanese occupation and the resumption of the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, a new decision of alliance confronted many within the overseas Hainanese community.
Communication and networks of support remained active throughout this period between the Hainanese Communists and the Southeast Asian mainland and Oceania, especially Singapore. During the Japanese occupation of Hainan, coastal China, and Southeast Asia, Hainan native-place connections continued to flow throughout the region. In these groups there was often a kind of pilgrimage mentality in which the ultimate aim of Hainanese in Southeast Asia was to return to their home island to fight the Japanese, or to support that fight monetarily. Throughout much of Southeast Asia there were opportunities to fight the Japanese on one’s own doorstep, but the idea of fighting for Hainan, on Hainan, seemed to have a more hallowed meaning among the Hainanese abroad.37
Even while it was impossible to establish radio communication between Hainan and the mainland Communist headquarters, the southern and western orientation of the Hainan Communists allowed them to maintain frequent contact with their supporters throughout the region. One Hainanese Communist operative established a newspaper in Singapore that provided its readers with updates on the progress of the Hainanese “people’s army.” Readers learned of the Hainan Communists being forced to renew their fight against the Nationalists, even before they could fully recover from the Japanese occupation that so devastated the economy and morale of the Hainanese people. The paper, Hainan Tide [Qiongchao bao], was mainly the work of a Chen Xianguang, who had received directives from the Chinese Communist Party central command. As a paper that was only circulated among the Hainanese community in Singapore, the circulation of one thousand was significant. The British authorities closed the paper in the summer of 1948, again reflecting, as in the example of Mission Pigeon, the way that the Hainan Communists were besieged not only by the Nationalists, but by an array of international forces.38 The British had returned to power in Singapore after the Japanese defeat, and they continued in their tradition of anti-Communist counterintelligence.39
In April 1946, the order came to shift the bulk of the Hainan Communists far north to Shandong province. The order reflected the disconnect between the northwestern mainland Communist movement, and that of Hainan. For five years there had been no radio contact between the two forces, and under Japanese occupation beginning in 1939, it was never easy for messages to travel in any other way either. The messenger who came in April of 1946 made his way to Feng Baiju via the Guangdong Communist movement, which also had maintained only poor and sporadic communications with the Yan’an base area during the war with Japan.
The winter of 1945–1946 had revealed the intentions of the Hainan Nationalist leadership to bend all its efforts to eliminating the Communist presence on Hainan once and for all. Feng and the Communists had resisted complete annihilation and now their numbers were growing with their inland territories, and their popular policies and resistance credentials won them favor not only among Hainan’s population, but also throughout the overseas Hainanese community, especially in Southeast Asia.
Still, in spite of the Hainan Communists’ growing popularity, there was no overcoming the Nationalists superiority at sea and in the air. This imbalance provided an effective blockade on the Communists in Hainan. There was no way for the Hainan Communists to obey the order to retreat north (beiche). They simply did not have the resources to get two thousand or more Communist officers and soldiers off the island and up the coast to Shandong. Sending the messenger back to Yan’an with this response—that it would be impossible for the Hainanese Communists to obey this order and that they would be forced to remain on the island—would have been sufficient explanation for why the northern Communists could forget about being joined by the southern guerrillas. But Feng went a step further, and emphasized the strength and vitality of the Communist movement on the island. He noted that indeed it was impossible for him to implement the order to retreat to the north because of the Nationalist sea power and the blockade that prevented any movement of significant forces to and from the island. But then he went on. He remarked that even if it were possible to move the bulk of the forces under his command, he did not see how they would be able to preserve their gains on the island. In Feng’s view, this led him to wonder how the Communist forces might return to the island and take it without a friendly force there to coordinate the attack.
While the Hainan Communist movement had taken on a distinctly local character, by all accounts, the reestablishment of radio contact with Yan’an was celebrated by the Hainan leadership as the renewal of the guerrilla movement’s sense of purpose, and vindication of decades of struggle. The Hainan Communists never avoided the tutelage or threatened to actively oppose their mainland commanders. And their activities over the past half-decade of radio silence were congratulated in 1946, and they were encouraged to keep on this path.40
The order to retreat south, to Vietnam, was a clear vindication of Hainan’s valued and time-honored connections with the Southeast Asian mainland. And in explicit advice from the mainland, shortly after the resumption of radio contact, the Hainan Communists were encouraged to expand their connections with Southeast Asian overseas Chinese supporters. This reflected similar orders that they had received as early as 1940 from the mainland Party Central.41 So the Hainan revolution was not willfully violating mainland Communist orders in its policies to connect to the Southeast Asian international community, or to move forward with improvisational plans in its economic and military policy. But there was precedent for the concerns of mainland Communist leaders that the Hainan Column and its leadership was becoming too focused on its local revolution, and that when the time came, the Hainan Communists might not be prepared to sacrifice for the new nation.
But as the final arrangements were being made, in the summer of 1946, for the resumption of radio contact between the Hainan and mainland Communist commands, the Hainan Communist leadership sent one of their highest officials, Zhuang Tian, up through Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Shanghai to meet with local and provincial Party leaders, and finally to Nanjing, where he met with Zhou Enlai.42 This was a strategic move by the Hainan Communists, if their aim was to convey a sense of loyalty and adherence to the mainland Communist Party even while gaining a sympathetic ear and increased autonomy in their local revolution. Zhuang Tian was a “Long Marcher” and a native son of Hainan, having returned to the island from Yan’an in 1940.
In Nanjing, among Zhou Enlai’s retinue he met many old classmates from the “Japanese Resistance University” in Yan’an where he had been a student and instructor. Zhou gave Zhuang three days to prepare a report for him. While Zhuang had traveled aboard a British steamer from Hong Kong, he did not carry any documents that might compromise his mission. While Zhuang was preparing the extensive report, Zhou Enlai impressed his guerrilla guests—Zhuang and another native Hainanese—by presenting them with gifts of Western-style suits, leather shoes, and comfortable quarters.
Zhou listened with surprise as Zhuang finally made his extensive report, which emphasized the survival of the Hainan Column in spite of overwhelming odds. After more than twenty years the red flag had never fallen on Hainan, in spite of the best efforts of the Japanese and the Nationalists. Now, with the bulk of Nationalist forces removed from Hainan after a series of embarrassing defeats at the hands of the Communists, it would be easier than ever for the Hainan Column to continue its fight. “We can continue the fight indefinitely, and we trust that Party Central will not lightly discard this piece of South China’s revolutionary base areas.”43
Zhuang Tian received Zhou Enlai’s support for continuing the resistance on Hainan. The ongoing struggle was a “struggle of self-defense.”44 Feng Baiju continued to be more assertive than Zhuang Tian in emphasizing the local nature of the Hainan struggle, often distinguishing it from the larger civil war on the mainland. In Feng’s speeches and reports that are extant from and about the early civil war period immediately following the Japanese withdrawal, his emphasis is always on Hainan. His speeches and writings dealing specifically with the retreat orders are not openly defiant, but it is clear that the Qiongzhou Strait that separates Hainan from mainland China seemed far wider in that time to Feng. One phrase that he used in describing the mainland Chinese civil war context was guonei, which might be translated as “within the country,” “domestically,” “the interior.” He uses this phrase in contrast to the Hainan revolution, even while he professes his loyalty to the cause of the greater Chinese Communist revolution. While the mainland Communist rallying cry became, “Fight to Nanjing, capture Chiang Kai-shek alive,” Feng even changed that to suit his local purposes, invoking the chant, “Fight to Haikou, capture Han Hanying alive.”45
Feng Baiju, as the unrivaled leader of the Hainan Communist movement, was beyond the reach of the mainland Communists. He was the authority on Hainan for the Communists, and he aimed to keep that movement alive. It is clear that Feng’s priority was in Hainan. There is no indication in Hainan or in the mainland Communist leadership’s assessment of Hainan’s Communists of any concern about what would later be called “localism,” or what in other regions of China was called “mountaintoppism.” “ ‘Mountaintoppism’ is Chinese Communist jargon used to describe someone who suffers from ‘mountain-stronghold mentality, a type of sectarianism,’ that is, a tendency on the part of individuals or groups to stress their own importance and identity and to act independently of central Party authority.”46 Benton, in this study that narrated the foundational Communist entities that would later coalesce in the New Fourth Army, does not include the Hainan Communist movement because his focus is on those movements that did feed the later New Fourth Army. But Feng Baiju seems a likely candidate for the label of mountaintoppist. He would later be one of the main targets of the Anti-localism Campaigns of 1952 and 1957, and the characteristics of a localist in this period seem to be precisely those of a mountaintoppist who has made the transition from revolutionary to ruler.
Perhaps it was Hainan’s distance from Yan’an, or its perceived irrelevance to the Communist leadership, or the impossibility of cracking the whip of discipline over the island’s leadership, but in actuality, Feng’s revolutionary raison d’être was always Hainan. Benton goes on, “Mountaintoppists are often accused in Party literature of wanting to set up ‘independent kingdoms.’ ”47 And this is precisely the same language that the Communist establishment would use in their later persecution of the “localists” who favored providing for their home province instead of sacrificing for the sake of the new national regime. Ezra Vogel, in his study of the first two decades of Communist rule in Canton, notes that “Hainan island had been the one place in [Guangdong] where localism was so firmly entrenched that the area was left alone during land reform. Gradually, the outside authorities attempted to infiltrate the ‘independent kingdom of [Feng Baiju].’ ” While Vogel maintains the quotation marks for the Nanfang ribao editorial voice in labeling Feng the king of Hainan, he does not seem to take issue with the central Communist view that an essentially federated or provincialized perspective of state-building in a revolutionary regime might allow an alternative path.48
Although these labels of “mountaintoppist” and “localist” are taken from different times and places in the history of the Chinese Communist movement, it is clear that Feng would wear both of those labels. And his persistence in the type of leadership decisions that would earn him those labels, even being aware that other leaders throughout China were suffering persecution for similar behavior, seems to suggest that he would accept them without reservation or regret. Feng’s treatment in the political campaigns of the 1950s are examined further in chapter 7, but the 1946 retreat orders should be understood as part of a pattern in an uncomfortable and asymmetrical disciplinary relationship between the Communist Party’s central authority and the Hainan leadership. The perception of motives in Hainanese localism, on the part of the mainland Communists leadership, was that the zero-sum relationship of local and national loyalties and priorities was tipped in favor of the local in Hainan, and the leadership sought to ensconce itself as the local satraps.
If Feng had left Hainan as he was ordered to do by the Party authorities in 1946, or if he had tried to run the Nationalist blockade and make his way to the north, Feng claimed that the Hainan Nationalist movement would use the opportunity to crack down hard on those portions of the Hainan community that were expressly supporting the Communists. The Li people, the progressive students and intellectuals in the coastal towns and cities, the farmers and fishermen of the inland and coast who sent their sons and daughters to join Feng, they would all suffer for the support that they had provided Feng and the Hainan Communists.
Or at least this was the case that Feng made when he responded to the order to move his fighting force off the island and to the north. Feng’s language combined an articulation of his obedience to the central command of the Party and an assertion of his position as Hainan’s undisputed leader. The Hainanese Communists would stay put, and that was final. He was not able to implement an order from the central command, but he also did not waste the opportunity to assert his command of the Hainan Communist movement. He would be here, he said, when the time came for the final Communist victory on Hainan. And he would be the leader who would protect the interests of the Communist movement on Hainan and the lives of its supporters until that final victory. Feng’s desire to assert his strength on Hainan in relation to the central command is not clearly an asymmetrical power play. Throughout his communications with the mainland Communists during the 1930s and 1940s, he solicited orders and direction for the development of the Hainan Communist movement.
Still, Feng must have been aware that there was not simply a single revolutionary line that never changed with the times. Through improvisation during the early period of the civil war, before the Japanese invasion of Hainan in 1939, Feng had kept the Hainan movement afloat without any help from the mainland. The political and military lines of the Communist movement did not always dovetail into a coherent and single plan that all could easily follow throughout the massive country. For the guerrilla, the first order of business is survival.
Whether Feng sought to keep the Hainan movement alive and in Hainan for the sake of the national Communist movement, or whether his primary motivation was to keep his feet on his home soil, cannot be clearly known. What is known is that decisions like the disobedience of 1946 led to a perception on the part of the mainland Communists that the Hainanese were interested mainly in perpetuating their own leadership in their Hainan fiefdom rather than contributing to the national revolution. This became clear during the anti-localism campaigns of the 1950s. In the longer context of the Hainanese Communist movement, from its predecessors who helped bring about the fall of the Qing, straight through the victorious 1950 campaign, it is clear that we should challenge the zero-sum equation of national and local loyalty that developed in the campaigns of the 1950s. The dramatic campaign to take Hainan for the Chinese Communist cause in the spring of 1950 proved that victory could be won and shared between the locality and the nation.