SHARING VICTORY
The Communist Conquest of Hainan Island
With the successful Communist campaign to take Hainan in the spring of 1950, approximately half of the Nationalists’ territory fell into Communist hands, the other half being Taiwan. Tibet also remained outside of the new regime’s control, but plans and propaganda targeted both of these regions. The battle for Hainan was the last major conflict of the Chinese Civil War. The announcement from Beijing was triumphant but simple: “Our Guangdong vanguard of the People’s Liberation Army overcame the resistance of the enemy’s army, navy, and air force. With the assistance of the Hainan Column, they heroically landed on Hainan, and swiftly mopped up the remnants of the enemy forces, completely liberating the entire island.” The declaration congratulated the victorious forces, citing the leadership of nine commanders. Eight of the commanders cited were with the mainland force and only one was Hainanese. In conclusion, it was noted that the success of the Hainan campaign was an example for the imminent liberation of Taiwan and Tibet.1
But this announcement conveyed none of the complexity that had made the Hainan conquest possible. So divergent were the mainland and Hainanese views of the island’s conquest that, depending on one’s perspective, the Chinese Communist fight for Hainan island had lasted either two short weeks or twenty-three long years. The final battle and decisive push in the victorious campaign during the spring of 1950 took only a few weeks, as People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops landed on the island’s northern beaches and joined with the Hainan Column to defeat the Nationalist forces there. But the local guerrillas had been fighting the Nationalists on and off—mostly on—for twenty-three years, since the spring of 1927.
In historical memory, therefore, the Hainan campaign has at least two distinct narratives. One recounts a “people’s flotilla” of wooden junks, some with motors hastily rigged to the stern, ferrying thousands of PLA soldiers through the famously dangerous eddies and shifting shoals of the narrow Qiongzhou Strait to liberate Hainan, enduring punishing fire from Nationalist warships and planes. In one recent history of the modern Chinese army, the case of Hainan is opened and closed with an especially laconic treatment: “The landing forces quickly overran the island.”2 Other accounts of the campaign, remembered from the perspective of the troops who crossed with the PLA Fourth Field Army’s Fifteenth Corps, also emphasize crossing the treacherous strait as the most important part of the campaign, with the indelible image of wooden boats captained by fishermen volunteers taking on the Nationalists’ modern warships and planes.
A 1998 Chinese history, Liberating Hainan (Hainan jiefang), begins with the winter planning on the mainland of 1949–1950 for the assault on Hainan. While the focus in that study is mainly a history of the Fourth Field Army, it is telling that the local Hainanese context of the campaign is not introduced until the fifth chapter, where five lines of text are apportioned for the twenty-three year struggle of the Hainan Communists.3 The same text quotes a firsthand account of the events from the perspective of a soldier with the landing force, which reveals the precedent of this bias in praising the accomplishments of the preparations and the landing on Hainan over the coordination and cooperation with the local forces: “This miracle [of setting sail to take Hainan with soldiers who had never been to sea before] surprised many of the old seamen, and they praised the men saying, ‘Chairman Mao’s army is full of true warriors, true warriors.’ ”4 Miraculous indeed, as one sailor cried out in relief after waiting in the doldrums of the Qiongzhou Strait, “Chairman Mao has called the east wind. Hurry and raise the sails.”5 As with the image of wooden boats taking on Nationalist destroyers, hyperbole and apparently even the supernatural characterized the retelling of the PLA crossing to take Hainan.
The other narrative of the Hainan conquest is summed up by the slogan, “For twenty-three years, the red flag never fell,” recalling the long and difficult insurgency waged by the local Hainan Communist forces. A year after the campaign, in early 1951, the Hainanese Communist leader, Feng Baiju, wrote an article to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the 1921 founding of the Chinese Communist Party. In this piece, he recounted the long history of the Party on Hainan, enduring through “the endless, dark days, and finally joining in the great victory of the entire people’s revolution.” He noted that Hainan was just a “small example,” but he went on to describe the “special circumstances” of being “blockaded, surrounded on four sides by counter-revolutionaries.” He also reiterated that the Communists on the mainland had been unable to support the Hainan revolutionaries with instruction, troops, or materiel for much of their struggle, and that the Hainan Column had relied on the people of Hainan for their support. This was the victory of the Hainanese people.6 During the Japanese occupation of Hainan as well, the Hainan Column had been heralded in song as the righteous defenders of the island:
Who are the saviors of Hainan? The Hainan Column.
Everyday they strike the Japanese devils, and protect Hainan.
Protecting Hainan and saving the people, the Hainan Column.
Who are the saviors of Hainan? The Hainan Column.7
I begin with an introduction to the campaign and its relevant context, then discuss two of the main figures in the Hainan Communist movement. Feng Baiju was the leader of the political and military Communist movement, and is recognized as the symbol of the revolution on Hainan. Ma Baishan was also a high-ranking political and military leader on Hainan, rising to the rank of general following the war. Ma traveled to Beijing several months before the Hainan conquest and met with the highest political and military commanders of the Chinese Communist Party. In this analysis, Feng represents the improvisational and pragmatic aspect of the Hainan revolution, and Ma represents the constant awareness of Hainan’s connection to the larger Chinese Communist revolution. More than simply a trip to report Hainan’s local conditions in Beijing and receive orders, Ma’s mission to Beijing on the eve of the Communist takeover of Hainan was a kind of tributary journey—a promise of allegiance and dedication to the new Communist regime that he would actually witness being founded on the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen).
There was never a plan for secession on Hainan, and never hope by the Communist forces there of making common cause with the Nationalists. Their commitment to the national Communist movement was never challenged from within the movement, and that unswerving loyalty is embodied by Ma Baishan. Feng’s improvisational leadership was perceived as potentially subversive, and his local loyalties and priorities would obstruct his further advancement in the Party in the decade to come.
The central Chinese Communist perspective—that of Beijing, in the spring of 1950—will be most important in the concluding section, in an examination of the geopolitical importance of the Communist conquest of Hainan, and how national, regional, and global politics shaped the historical narrative that emerged from the campaign. Cold War geopolitics put the Hainan campaign center stage, and the military performance of the PLA was important in establishing its global image and prestige. The heroics of a band of scrappy local revolutionaries like the Hainanese had already become an old story seven months after the founding of the PRC. This type of narrative had been important as propaganda during the war against Japan, and earlier in the Civil War with the Nationalists. It had been useful in strengthening national resolve years earlier, but in the spring of 1950, this type of “people’s war” was not likely to intimidate the commanders of the new perceived enemy—Americans patrolling the Pacific with footholds in Japan and Taiwan.
So the history of the local origins of the Hainanese revolution, like many others that were not sanctioned in Beijing, has not been important to the geopolitical world of bluster and threats. But still the legacy of Hainan is wrapped tightly with that national narrative of the early Cold War. In May of 1950, half a year after the founding of the PRC and a month before the Korean War began, for Beijing’s purposes, Hainan’s debut on the global stage was to be seen most importantly as a triumph of the mighty PLA, not the local scrappers. This historical casting of these events parallels the propaganda emphasis on the Eight Route Army over the New Fourth Army on the mainland, another example of favoring the emergent power of the PRC, rather than its past as a “rabble in arms.”8 Therefore, the local context of the Hainan campaign was caught up in what Michael Szonyi calls “geopoliticization” in his study of Jinmen (Quemoy) in the Cold War. While Szonyi explains how the lives of the people of Nationalist Jinmen were affected by their precarious and unique Cold War situation, I will focus on how the global politics of the early 1950s affected the rewriting and forgetting of Hainan’s history.9
The speed of the Hainan conquest, and the Nationalist enemies’ hasty retreat to Taiwan, amazed even the Communist victors. The Communist military expedition from north to south China had been carried out with exceptional speed on the mainland, surpassing even the ambitious plans announced by Party headquarters. Almost overnight, after more than two decades of struggle, the Hainan guerrillas were transformed from harried bandits, living in jungle and mountain hideouts, into masters and heroes of their homeland. And with victory came a welcome new contingent of political and military paragons who, they expected, would help them build their new Hainan, free of the corruption and incompetence of the Nationalist rulers.10
Deng Hua, a Hunan general, was the main tactical officer of the PLA landing force, leading the Fifteenth Corps of the Fourth Field Army. His recollection of the final campaign for Hainan is an unadorned account of the maneuvers of the battles. This source outlines the campaign itself, emphasizing the campaign as a successful conquest for the new PRC. Deng also tends to minimize the contribution of the Hainan Communists, and celebrates the unstoppable might and courage of the landing forces.
The planning for the campaign began in the winter of 1949–1950 on the mainland’s Leizhou Peninsula of Guangdong Province, just over ten miles from the northern Hainan coast. By February 1, 1950, a final conference was held involving the leadership of both the Hainan Communists and the PLA officers, including Deng and Ye Jianying. In the first week of March, several vanguard units in thirteen junks were launched from Leizhou Peninsula, and after some fighting on the beaches of northwestern Hainan, they managed to join with the Hainan Communists and retreated to Communist bases inland.
While Communist strategy was an important factor in the takeover of Hainan, Nationalist disorganization and disunity also played an important role. Witnesses to the final days of Nationalist rule on Hainan, like New York Times correspondent, Seymour Topping, discussed the failings of the Nationalists authorities on the island in the early weeks and months of 1950. The disunity and frustration among the top Nationalist command reflected in Topping’s writing could hardly have given the American public any confidence in the Nationalists on Taiwan as a stalwart and steady ally in the early rumblings of the Cold War. In his memoir years later, Topping remembered his conversations with Chen Jitang and Xue Yue, both of whom complained about Chiang Kai-shek’s reluctance to reinforce them in the quantity and quality that they requested. In describing his meetings with Xue Yue and Chen Jitang, Topping later wrote:
At the Nationalist military headquarters, I met with the top commander [Xue Yue] … , the former governor of [Guangdong] Province, who was known as the “Little Tiger.” The general, an energetic man, dressed in a flashy tailored American-style uniform, complained he was receiving only meager aid from Chiang Kai-shek. He was frantically trying to organize a defense force out of some 140,000 troops, about 80,000 of them combat veterans, evacuated from the mainland … [And on Chen Jitang, governor of Hainan …] The fifty-eight-year-old Cantonese marshal, a lively, outspoken man dressed in a brown tunic and white Panama hat, sat with me on the veranda of the [Haikou] airport’s passenger shack gazing out to the Communist-held [Leizhou] coast. The governor complained angrily about the sparse assistance he was getting from Chiang Kai-shek. “We have not received the money or supplies we need …”11
The faltering and fractured defenses of the Nationalists still did not prevent them from punishing both the Hainanese Communists and the Fourth Field Army organizing on the Leizhou peninsula. Topping watched as Nationalists bombed both Feng’s interior bases and those on the mainland with impunity. But the successes of secret landings of the early probing vessels along the northern and western coasts of Hainan in late February and early March led to a more substantial vanguard force of several dozen junks, deployed on March 10, 26, and 31, which followed the pattern of the first. Some of these units were scattered, and the Nationalist enemy was unable to track how many mainland Communist forces were now augmenting the Hainan Column. By mid-April, the full-scale attack was launched. On the night of April 16, the Communist junks began crossing the Qiongzhou Strait in waves, totaling 318 boats of various sizes. They landed after losing boats and taking casualties in the crossing, and were met and aided by the Hainan Communists in the early morning hours of April 17. After this landing, the conquest proceeded rapidly, with the Nationalists retreating to the south. Communist forces marched into Haikou in the north on April 23, and only seven days later, the southern towns of Sanya and Yulin had also fallen. The Nationalist commanders and thousands of the Nationalist forces fled to Taiwan, and on May 1, 1950, complete victory was announced in Beijing.12
The differences were stark between the PLA regulars and their Hainan guerrilla comrades. As they met on the palm-lined beaches of Hainan, in the towns and small cities, and in jungle hideouts across the island, both were surprised at the others’ appearance. The Hainanese guerrillas wore sandals, shorts, and light collared shirts, if they chose to wear any shirt at all in the tropical heat. Their skin was copper, their faces gaunt, their muscles wire cables of strength from decades of warfare and jungle subsistence. Their clothes were worn and their packs were light. Among the few essential components of their kit were a rifle, a canteen, a few days’ supply of food, and a hammock.13
Every day that military and weather conditions allowed, the guerrillas hung their hammocks and took long afternoon naps to avoid exhaustion during the hottest hours of the day. The PLA regulars, many of them northerners and not accustomed to the slower life of a tropical island, joked about this local custom. For some of the mainlander regulars, the custom of midday napping seemed to reflect Hainanese laziness, or worse, a lack of revolutionary zeal. The mainlanders had, after all, braved death and lost hundreds of their comrades in crossing the Qiongzhou Strait from Guangdong to Hainan to liberate these loafers.14
The PLA regulars had spent three months on the mainland coast of Guangdong, learning to swim and sail, and to operate their improvised motorboats. They were well-outfitted and well-fed compared to their guerrilla counterparts. The Hainan campaign was, after all, center stage in China’s civil war in the spring of 1950.15 The Fourth Field Army had been assigned the task of liberating Hainan, and posted to Guangdong Province’s Leizhou Peninsula, which stretched south, close to the northern coast of Hainan. But not close enough for the PLA soldiers, many of whom had marched from their home provinces in the northeast. For them, it was a terrifying prospect to swim—or try to swim—after tumbling out of a crowded junk.
Han Xianchu (1913–1986), Fifteenth Corps Deputy Commander of the PLA’s Fourth Field Army remembered the early days of the training. “Beginning the training at sea, a company boarded a boat, and 80 percent of them looked as if they wanted to throw up.”16 But crossing the narrow Qiongzhou Strait in April and May, after the most favorable winds of the winter had passed, was difficult for even an experienced sailor. The rough waters were an unwelcome introduction to life at sea for the northern soldiers, and the increasing heat would make the conquest even more difficult.
To celebrate the Communist victory on Hainan, Feng organized a banquet for the officers of both mainland and Hainan forces.17 It would be an opportunity for speeches and celebration, and Feng chose to hold the event at the Five Ministers’ Temple. The Temple stood close to the northern Hainan city of Haikou, and it had been commissioned half a century earlier by the Qing reformer, Zhang Zhidong, to honor five Tang and Song dynasty officials who had been banished to Hainan.18 These officials, along with a sixth, Su Dongpo (also known as Su Shi, who shone brighter than all the luminaries in Hainan’s pantheon) had risked all to criticize imperial excess or corruption, and they had been banished to this malarial and barbaric southern island. After arriving, the ministers made the most of their exile, reforming and building local infrastructure, educating candidates for the imperial examination, and becoming off-center heroes of China, and the pride of Hainan.19 The Temple was a significant place to choose for the banquet, because it emphasized Hainan’s distinct culture within China’s imperial history. The Hainanese had welcomed the spirits of the imperial ministers who were honored and worshipped at the Temple, and their spirits are still summoned and soothed, as testified by heaping mounds of incense burned at their shrines. These old ministers might have anticipated the tension between the newly welcomed PLA guests and their Hainan hosts.
The question of speed and urgency is a central one in Dilemmas of Victory, a recent volume of essays on the early years of PRC rule.20 This revolutionary urgency was a radically different cultural construct than the Hainanese guerrilla struggle. For twenty-three years the Hainan Communists had met with varying success, sometimes with their ranks swelling to thousands of armed fighters, and at other times, having as few as twenty-six partisans camped in their commander’s family home.21 The Hainan Communist movement was characterized by improvisation and unusual allies throughout two decades of Feng Baiju’s leadership. The geographic necessity of maintaining close ties with the civilian population led to Feng’s popular maxim, “Mountains can’t hide people; only people can hide people.”22 This meant political flexibility and patience. Both of these qualities of the Hainan revolution would be discarded in the urgency of the new regime that came to Hainan in the spring of 1950.
In late 1948 and early 1949, Feng took the initiative to organize political and military schools within Communist-controlled base areas. In an October 24, 1948, notice, “Chairman Feng” announced a planned Hainan Public School to be opened in March of the following year. The purpose, Feng proclaimed, was to “foster mass criticism,” and to meet the educational needs of the island, or at least the parts of the island controlled by the Communists.23 In January of the following year, Chairman Feng announced plans of the Hainan Interim Democratic Government to establish a military school as well.24 On the eve of the Communist conquest of Hainan, Feng Baiju and the Hainan Communist leadership launched financial initiatives that were designed to succeed where the Nationalists had spectacularly failed. But telling aspects of the policy revealed that it was first in Feng Baiju that the Hainan revolution was to trust, perhaps vindicating mainland concerns about early strains of local interests trumping the national revolution.
For the most part, the Nationalists’ handling of Hainan’s financial sector ran parallel to the disastrous policies of the Nationalist mainland regime.25 In late 1949 and early 1950, the Nationalist governor of Hainan, Chen Jitang undertook an effort to consolidate Hainan’s banking system. In an attempt to unify and strengthen Nationalist control of the island’s economy, Chen tried to summon prominent local bankers under a single “Hainan Cooperative Bank.” Chen’s gesture came very late, however, and it met with no success. It is easy to dismiss the effort as posturing for the Taiwan central authority, but Chen did not receive the Nationalists’ endorsement in this effort. The failure of the Nationalists to support Chen’s last-minute effort to shore up the island’s apparatuses of governance was not an isolated incident, as became apparent in the military confrontation to come. Chen was given neither the titular endorsement nor the concrete support he needed to realize his efforts to save Hainan for the Nationalists. He received only ambivalent directives from Taiwan.26 Apparently, Chiang Kai-shek felt that such an effort would have overstretched the Taiwan defensive capabilities.
The Hainan Communists had experimented several times with issuing currency in the territories under its control.27 They met with limited success, but it was the issuance of “liberation bonds” (jiefang gongzhai) in the winter and spring of 1949–1950 that caught Chen Jitang’s attention by strengthening the movement, and led to a final attempt by the popular Nationalist general, Xue Yue, to eradicate the Communist guerrillas on Hainan. In denominations of one yuan, 400,000 yuan in bonds were printed and issued, with the promise of an annual interest rate of 5 percent. The bonds were issued in exchange for supplies from villagers and other donors, in anticipation of the Communist takeover. According to the Hainan Communist records, by the end of 1951, all of the principal amount, plus interest on the bonds, was paid out in exchange for renminbi, the new currency of the People’s Republic of China.28
The policy was carried out by the Hainan Column under Feng Baiju, and at the behest of the Southern Branch Party Bureau as preparation for the imminent invasion.29 While Feng had approval for the issuance of these bonds, one noteworthy characteristic in the isolated Hainan example was that the bonds were imprinted with a woodcut image of Chairman Feng Baiju and his signature, along with that of his vice chairman, He Dan.
Prior to the issuance of this Communist currency, the Nationalist currency issued on Hainan bore the image of Sun Yat-sen, not one of the local Hainanese leaders, nor even of Chiang Kai-shek. The infrastructural isolation of Hainan meant that the presses for liberation bonds used by the Communists on the mainland were not imitated or brought to Hainan to be used by the local revolutionaries. The Japanese occupiers of Hainan had also made unsuccessful attempts at implementing a currency policy that would work on Hainan. This and the Nationalist economic failures were the foundation for Feng’s monetary policies.
The successful distribution of the Hainan Column’s war bonds had broad implications for the transition to Communist rule. Each member of the amphibious force that arrived in mid-April carried three days’ rations to sustain them on the march through the jungle to the Communist base areas. When this ran out, the distribution of war bonds allowed the Hainan Column to stock sufficient grain and other supplies in preparation to carry on the campaign with ranks that would be swollen by the arrival of the PLA regulars. Further, the Hainan war bonds allowed for a smooth transition to a centralized banking system. As late as the first week of May 1950, Feng was still managing the financial transition. Rather than wait for an appointment from Beijing or Guangzhou, Feng appointed his Hainan comrade Lin Keze to the task of consolidating the Haikou banks. Lin was trained on the mainland, but his knowledge of the local gold reserves and banks of the Nationalists allowed him to accomplish the task quickly.30
Where Chen Jitang had failed in his attempt to unify the banks of Hainan under a single authority, the Communists quickly succeeded. By May 28, 1950, the Hainan Civil and Military Administrative Committee had taken control of the six major banks on Hainan, and by June 9, had consolidated them into the Hainan Branch of the People’s Bank of China.31 Within weeks of the May 1 declaration of Communist victory on Hainan, the major financial apparatuses were solidly under CCP control. The work of the Hainan Column in preparing for the takeover made this an almost seamless transition.
Ma Baishan recalled the May 1950 celebration at the Five Ministers’ Temple as a joyous occasion, with speeches, singing, dancing, and many toasts to the victory that was shared by the Hainan and mainland Communists.32 As they first assembled in a small field under the walls of the temple, some of the officers and men and women who could not understand each other’s dialects communicated by enthusiastically gesturing with their hands, or scratching the Chinese characters that they both understood in the sand.33 Feng Baiju and Deng Hua entered the banquet together, and the crowd erupted in applause for the two most celebrated heroes of the campaign. There was a stage set up for them, with red flags hanging from each corner, and a banner hung across it that read, “Conference to celebrate Hainan’s victorious liberation and joining forces.” The outdoor banquet was an occasion for relatively lavish celebration. Though the food was simple, it filled the bellies of the guerrillas for the first time in what seemed like ages. Ma Baishan sat with Feng Baiju and looked on with pride. Ma noted the speeches of both Feng and the Hunan native, Deng Hua, who had landed on the beaches with the forces of the Fourth Field Army.
Just a few months earlier, Ma had seen a far grander celebration. He had traveled to Beijing with the commander of Hainan’s Li people, Wang Guoxing. Their mission had been to report and receive orders for the final Hainan campaign.34 Just as Feng Baiju was the leader of the Communist movement on Hainan, Wang Guoxing was the leader of the Li minority group that made up about 15 percent of the island’s population.35 For centuries of imperial Chinese rule of Hainan, the Li people had been an annoyance to attempts to control the island, at times rising in open rebellion, and consistently obstructing Han Chinese settlement of the island’s interior.36 Beginning in the 1920s, the Nationalists were clumsy and brutal in their attempts to negotiate with the Li people, leading to the latter’s further estrangement from their mainland colonizers.
The Japanese were more efficient in suppressing and controlling the Li, beginning with their occupation of Hainan in February of 1939. Japanese enslavement of much of the Li population for mining operations in the central Li regions of the island led to violent and organized uprisings by the Li. Finally, in 1943, after the Japanese forced the Nationalists to seek an inland refuge, they massacred several Li villages, leading to the Li Baisha Uprising against them in July of 1943. This was shortly followed by Wang Guoxing’s successful efforts to link the Li forces under his command with Feng Baiju and the Hainan Independent Column.37 While the Li did not come to their alliance with the Hainanese Independent Column by the path of Communist ideology or even Chinese nationalism, the alliance resulted in the significant strengthening of the Hainan Communist forces. Wang’s help was to be indispensable in the survival of the Communist presence on Hainan, for the Li maintained control of many of the nearly inaccessible reaches of the island’s southern mountainous and jungle interior.
Wang’s trip with Ma Baishan to Beijing in the fall of 1949 was a kind of tribute mission, in the tradition of the missions of imperial China that secured regional alliances and shored up the military, political, and cultural boundaries of China. Ostensibly, Ma was Hainan’s representative at the Political Consultative Conference that was to be held there. In the summer of 1949, when Wang and Ma made the trip, much of southern China was still in Nationalist hands, so Ma and the rest of the Hainan delegation to the conference had to travel with fake documents and under assumed names, and separately. The traveling was dangerous and slow, and Ma bought his tickets under the name Li, his cover that of a businessman. He frequently changed trains, boats, and trucks when he thought that it was possible that he had aroused some suspicion. Ma reached the northern city of Qingdao by early September, and was safe within Communist territory. The Hainan delegation regrouped joyously, and in the surreal atmosphere of peace, the band of guerrillas was given two days to see the sights in Jinan.38 Then they made their way on to Beiping (“Northern Peace”), the city that had long been China’s imperial capital, but had been supplanted by the Nationalists’ Nanjing (“Southern Capital”) regime as capital of the republic. In a few days it would again be named Beijing (“Northern Capital”).
On October 1, 1949, Ma was invited to a grand event to be held in the center of the city. Atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) Ma Baishan watched as Party Chairman Mao Zedong announced the founding of the Communist People’s Republic of China. After meeting with the highest military officials of the new nation, and giving their report, Ma and Wang made their way back south. So fast had the Communist military conquest of the mainland progressed, that Ma did not need to travel under an assumed name with fake documents, moving through newly secured Communist territory. Arriving back in Guangdong, at the February 1950 meeting that established the final plans for the assault, Ma communicated Feng Baiju’s assessment of the situation, and counseled against a direct assault on the north. Instead, he advised several pincer movements that would avoid a blunt battle of attrition to take Haikou.
Having observed the weakened state of the Nationalist forces that had retreated there in front of the southern Communist expedition, Ma and Feng realized that a frontal assault would most likely lead to a bloody and protracted battle for the city. This might have revitalized the morale of the Nationalists and turned the civilian population against the Communists.39
The examples of Jinmen and Dengbu were still fresh in the memory of all Communist military commanders, and doubtless remembered as a rare and proud victory for Nationalist leaders. While almost all of the news from China’s military front in 1948–1949 was favorable to the Communists, the attempts in the fall of 1949 to take Jinmen and Dengbu were tactical blunders. When the Nationalists moved their political and military headquarters to Taiwan, and maintained significant, threatening island holdouts, amphibious warfare took on new urgency for the Communists. The Nationalists maintained massive fortifications on the Zhoushan archipelago, Jinmen, Hainan, and Taiwan. The Communists lacked any credible sea or air military force, though contemporary and historical bluster and propaganda suggested that was not the case, or that Soviet aid might soon change this.
In October of 1949, similar to the Hainan preparations that began three months later, Communist military commanders assembled a flotilla of junks to ferry soldiers across the narrow channel that separated the tiny island of Jinmen from the mainland. The momentum of the land war that had been so favorable to the Communists was drowned in the narrow waters, as communications failed, boats were scattered, and Nationalist fighters and warships obliterated the amphibious force. The Communist forces were repulsed, and Jinmen today is still administered by the Taipei government, in spite of its proximity to the mainland.
The lessons of Jinmen chastened the Communist high command, and far more preparations went into the Hainan campaign. Chairman Mao stated the obvious, as he had a tendency to do in military matters during the final stage of the civil war, when he remarked in a telegram that Hainan was not the same as Jinmen. He noted that the enemy force was relatively weak, and that on Hainan, there was Feng Baiju. While the first statement was self-evident in the fall of 1949, Mao perhaps was wrong when he said this in January of 1950. Hainan forces had been reinforced in the meantime, and the Nationalist General Xue Yue had been assigned to the defense of the island. Xue was universally respected as a tenacious and brilliant tactician, and he wasted no time in attempting to eradicate the Hainan Independent Column.
At the May 5 banquet, Feng Baiju gave one of the two main speeches that drew roars of approval from the assembled audience. Deng Hua gave the other speech. After the campaign, Deng briefly held the top post in the political and military authority on Hainan, with Feng as his second in command. Deng’s speech acknowledged the help of the Communist forces, and he credited the local guerrillas with a major role in the victory. “Had it not been for the Hainan Independent Column, the liberation of Hainan would not have been accomplished in the manner that it was.”40 Feng, in turn, said that the Communist conquest of Hainan would have been impossible without the help of the “great army” (dajun), that arrived from the mainland.
While the speeches of both Deng and Feng paid compliments to each other’s forces and their mutual roles in the Communist takeover of Hainan, there was some tension in apportioning credit. It seemed that there was immediately an awareness of the zero-sum perception of the mainland and local Communist forces. That is, there was only so much glory to go around. For those interested in the political stakes, that glory had to be carefully apportioned to the two clearly distinguished forces of Hainanese and mainlanders. This reflected a concern with the divergent hopes of the mainland and local interests for Hainan’s future. If the Hainan guerrillas gave all credit for the conquest to the mainland forces, or vice versa, the side that laid claim to that glory would be in a position to steer the political future of the island.
While the interests of the local guerrillas and the mainland regulars were different going into the campaign, and continuing in the wake of the victory, the military campaign itself was an unqualified success for both sides. The shared enemy of the Nationalists was the foundation of their cooperation. The Hainan Independent Column had relied heavily on the Li for its survival. Orders from the mainland to abandon the Hainan base had been flouted in 1946, albeit as deferentially as possible, by the Hainan Independent Column.41 This perhaps reflected a consistent preference on Hainan for representing local interests over those of the mainland revolution, if and when the two diverged.
The banquet of May 5, 1950, was one of the first public moments of interaction between mainland and Hainan Communist leaders following the victory. The speeches represented both past conflict and cooperation between the Hainan and mainland Communists, and future hopes for the island. Feng’s references to a “new Hainan” and the hopes for democratic change on the island reflected the interests of the Hainan revolution.
The Communist victory in the Hainan campaign, seen from the perspective of the island guerrillas, was a negotiation and a leap of faith. With victory came the greater Chinese Communist revolution, and naturally Hainan would become a part of the new Beijing regime. But the extent to which Hainan would maintain its leadership and autonomy was not clear. It was not clear that Beijing would endow Hainan island with provincial status, as had been long discussed in certain circles of Chinese politics in the far south. In the victorious ebullience of May 1950, leaders like Feng Baiju considered it to be the wrong moment for taking a stand on this question. Perhaps provincial status would come in time, but still, it was important that the local guerrillas were given their due, and Feng worked immediately to make sure that happened. As it happened, Hainan was not granted provincial status shortly after the Communist takeover. Only in 1988, almost fifteen years after Feng’s death, did Hainan become a province, and, according to one Hainan author, finally “history proved that Feng’s views and management had been correct.”42
Feng’s political acumen throughout his two decades of revolutionary leadership leaves no room for the possibility that the Hainanese revolutionary leadership was simply naive in its leap of faith into the arms of the Beijing regime. He had expectations for Hainan’s treatment in the new PRC regime, most obviously, provincial status for the island. But he was realistic about Hainan’s weak position in bargaining with a popular and powerful new Beijing government. The victorious conquest that brought the Communists to power on Hainan was a long fought struggle. The Communist leadership had allowed the Hainan leadership considerable leeway in its improvisational policy-making, and the flush of success perhaps masked the inevitable crackdown that would come with the rise of the Communists to power. Feng certainly realized this, judging from his writings. He often referred to the leadership of the Hainan Communists as being not adequately trained in matters of ideology.
In his speech at the Five Ministers’ Temple that came years after his repeated requests for better instructors and cadres to be sent to Hainan from the mainland, he still explicitly referred to the need for the Hainanese revolutionary leadership and its ranks to learn from the correct example of the mainlanders. Like Ma, Feng sought to strengthen ties to the mainland revolution at every opportunity, but this did not necessarily mean sacrificing the experienced leadership—not least, himself—for the sake of political purity or unquestioning obedience to the central Communist authority. This, however, is what happened quickly on Hainan. The first casualty was the history of the Hainan revolution, followed shortly by the weakening of the Hainanese leadership.
The insulated political and military situation on Hainan of the 1930s and 1940s was forever changed with the Communist victory there in the spring of 1950. The island became a prominent story throughout international headlines when the Communist victory meant that half of Nationalist-held territory had fallen into the hands of the Reds. While taking Taiwan presented far more logistical difficulties for the Communists, it was seen as the next step in the conquest. At the Five Ministers’ Temple, on the night of May 5, 1950, no rambunctious toasts were offered about the imminent taking of Taiwan. The forces that were preparing for this campaign were hundreds of miles up the Chinese coast, and their preparations to cross a broader expanse with little hope of having sufficient naval support was more than daunting. It seemed it would require a miracle, unless the campaign preparations stretched on for another year.
The United States did not offer direct support for holding Hainan, the way that they would with the Seventh Fleet for Taiwan following the outbreak of the Korean War. At the time of the Hainan campaign, however, there was no promise that sufficient direct U.S. military aid would be forthcoming in the final battle of the civil war that many expected would be fought for Taiwan. While the ideological world of the Cold War had been far from Hainan, it became an immediate factor once the PLA troops landed on the shores of the island.
But even with the strength of the PLA, and the extensive preparations of the local Communist forces, the Beijing regime’s posturing suggested insecurity in the volatile and uncertain early years of bluster and dissembling in the Cold War. What this meant on Hainan was that the victory must be swift and absolute. On the global stage, the Hainan campaign had not been a foregone conclusion. Outsiders saw this as a significant test of the young PRC, and its success or failure would be broadcast to the world by reporters in Hong Kong who were close enough to Hainan to bypass the propaganda reports from Beijing.
Feng Baiju and the leadership of the Communist movement had consistently built their revolution on improvisation and sensitivity in Hainan’s specific political and cultural environment. They had welcomed all comers to their cause, needing all the support that they could get to strengthen their forces in the face of relentless Japanese and Nationalists attempts to wipe them out. This had allowed the survival of the revolution on Hainan, but on the national level, the transition from revolution to rule meant that there was no longer as much of a need for survival-based policies. The days of guerrilla warfare were over, as much as the propaganda emanating from Beijing and Moscow insisted that the revolution was still alive, and would remain the perpetual life force of the new regime.
Beijing aimed to solidify its holdings, and to appear strong and unified on the global stage. The weakness of the Nationalists was already apparent to the world, and the Cold War rhetoric of China having been lost to the Communists was prevalent, especially in the view of the Americans. The global realm of politics in this period left no room for nuance on the ground. The titans of the Cold War made Hainan nothing more than a pawn in the game, a trophy island. And so Hainan became again the treasure island of China. Its strategic importance now took the place of its natural beauty and its exotic resources as its regional importance, but still the Hainan revolution was not the narrative that emerged from the conquest. In the wake of the success, the Hainanese revolutionaries cast their lot in with the new Beijing regime, and the PRC history of the events became one of revolutionary fishermen volunteering their boats and their skills and knowledge of the region, and ruddy-faced northern peasants braving the dangerous waters of the Qiongzhou Strait to bring the revolution to Hainan.
So the ebullient atmosphere of the celebration was tempered perhaps by several factors. Tibet and Taiwan had not yet been incorporated into the PRC, and both presented the new regime with formidable challenges. Taiwan was much farther from the coast than Hainan, and would require a much more sophisticated naval assault. Tibet was to become another pawn in the Cold War clashes. Meanwhile, nearby Vietnam, and Korea to the north were also flashpoints in the titanic struggle for influence in the region. This was another important difference between the Hainan Communists and the mainland regulars. The interests in the revolutionary struggle were different in their connection to this larger political context.
Most of the forces of the Fourth Field Army were far from their homes in northeastern China. Many of them had never stepped on a boat, and had only a few weeks of training along the Guangdong coast to prepare. As noted earlier, the high-ranking PLA officer, Han Xianchu, remembered the preparations with a combination of humor and hyperbolic celebration. The constant seasickness of the once landlocked Fourth Field Army amused some of the local fishermen, who ribbed them even as they praised their determination and eagerness to learn. Han’s account is full of Communist boilerplate and perhaps for this reason it has become one of the classic narratives about Hainan within the mythology of the Party’s rise. But Han seems to have had little regard for the work of the Hainan Column. In reference to the conference in which Ma Baishan instructed the mainland forces on how they should execute their landing operations, Han seems to insert Mao Zedong, standing over maps consulting with Lin Biao. This is confusing because Mao Zedong was in Moscow at the time, and Lin Biao was in Beijing.43 Ma Baishan does not appear in Han’s account, nor is Feng Baiju’s name mentioned. Still, Han’s account is insightful and valuable for the perspective of a mainland commander arriving on Hainan with the main landing force in the spring of 1950.
The Hainan campaign has taken on mythic proportions both on the island and the mainland. In most official accounts of the campaign, narratives like Han Xianchu’s version have come to prevail, recounting a spectacular, even miraculous battle at sea between wooden junks and Nationalist warships. Indeed, even with the lack of vigorous support from Taiwan, the Nationalists were far better equipped for the battle, with twenty-five warplanes, and more than fifty military vessels of various sizes and capacities.44 Nationalist bombing campaigns went essentially unanswered over the Communist troops on Guangdong’s Leizhou Peninsula, while they were preparing for their assault on Hainan. Only when the Nationalist gun placements had been seized by the Communist forces could they be used against superior Nationalist vessels as well as planes.45
The Taiwanese Nationalist headquarters had not favored the task of holding Hainan Island with much aid. Taiwanese papers had accused the Nationalist head of Hainan, Chen Jitang, of harboring his own parochial views, in language that foreshadowed later Communist accusations leveled at Feng Baiju.46 The same journal that criticized Chen for his localist views also encouraged the Nationalist fighters on Hainan to make “another Jinmen” of this battle and repel the Communist assault.47 Although high-level pessimism on Taiwan meant that little more materiel would be committed there, some popular optimism remained.
In spite of the wide variance in statistics on military capabilities of both Communist and Nationalist forces, it is clear that the strategic advantage appeared to be with the Nationalists. Most observers agreed that Hainan could be held, but concerns had grown among advisors who had experience with Communist guerrillas. Yan Xishan presented a classified assessment of the situation on Hainan, advising an immediate adoption of policies that built support at the village level.48 This was the only way the popularity of the Communists could be challenged. The policy answer to Yan Xishan’s report was to put a Nationalist national hero in charge of the suppression campaigns on the island. Xue Yue, like Chen Jitang, was a Guangdong native.
Two months before the Communist assault was launched from the mainland, Xue launched a suppression campaign against the Hainan Column and any other resisters to Nationalist rule.49 February 1950 was devastating to the Hainan Communists, but even after takeover of the island, Xue’s reputation as a hero of the resistance precluded any denigration of his character by the Communists. Other Nationalist leaders like Chen Hanguang did not share Xue’s credentials, and they became the villains of Hainan’s local history, with oral histories remembering him as a ruthless butcher.50 But even with the heroism or brutality of the various Nationalist leaders, it was indeed the “end of the line,” as A. Doak Barnett reported.
Between local militia forces and army regulars there were still as many as 200,000 Nationalist troops on Hainan, and the highest concentration of them was in Haikou, on the northern coast. When Barnett visited Hainan in November of 1949, he reported on the pathetic state of the Nationalist forces in Haikou. Many of them had been fleeing before the Communist lines as the PLA marched more swiftly than they themselves had anticipated from the northeast to the south. The Nationalist forces in Haikou were demoralized and malnourished. They were also poorly armed, for Barnett reports witnessing some of the troops selling their rusted weapons for food or money that was not forthcoming from Taiwan. While the Nationalist central authorities horded munitions and the best-trained troops on Taiwan, Nationalist forces on Hainan languished in bitterness. Many of these troops were ripe for Communist recruitment, and desertion was endemic among those who were healthy enough to make their way to the Communist base areas.51
Though the final battle had not been as taxing on the PLA as some had predicted, it was still a great triumph on the international stage. And so the Hainan revolutionaries who had held aloft the red flag for twenty-three years were silenced in a matter of months, drowned out by the rhetoric of a new, unified China. The Korean War and the Taiwan Straits shelling of Jinmen in the 1950s reduced Hainan again to being a backwater of China, and a trophy island won in the final days of the civil war.
At least on the history of the Hainanese revolution, the past two decades have seen a flood of historical analyses and recollection volumes published. It is no longer possible to tell the history of Hainan as an island saved by a “people’s flotilla” of volunteer fishermen and seasick PLA regulars. The essential role of the Hainan revolutionaries in the Communist success on the island complicates and enriches this narrative. But once the military campaign was won, a series of complex political issues needed attention. The success of the Hainan Communists, their endurance and their resilience, had often been achieved through improvisation, local resourcefulness, and independent action. With the transition from revolution to rule, assuming the burden of power on the island, the Hainan Communists were in for a jolting entry into the new People’s Republic of China.