The best place to begin an examination of the Communist movement on Hainan island is with the proud and unique declaration made by its leaders in 1950: “For twenty-three years, the Red flag did not fall (Ershisan nian hongqi bu dao).” In no other major Chinese territory can this claim of continuity in the Communist revolution be made. From the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) origins in Shanghai, to Jinggangshan and other base areas, to the hallowed ground of Yan’an, all major territories of the CCP were overcome by the Nationalists, the Japanese, regional governors, or a combination of these, before they were later retaken and incorporated into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Hainan’s geographical insularity, and the contingency and perennial historical trends connected to this “islandness,” played a crucial part in shaping the distinctive history in the period examined here.
In Hainan, the Communist presence grew and shrank throughout the more than twenty-three years from its founding in 1926 until its incorporation in the PRC in early 1950. But even during times when there were only twenty-six known members of the Hainan movement, seeking refuge in the ancestral village of their leader, Feng Baiju (1903–1973), and even when they lost all communications with the mainland Communist leadership, they endured as a continuous force on the island. The persistence of Hainan’s revolution sometimes came at the price of ideological purity. Pragmatism, improvisation, and isolation became its defining features. The solitude and remoteness of Hainan shaped the movement, as Feng and others sank deep roots on the island, drawing on the movement’s local pride, as well as its unflagging and tenacious impetus to survival. In this work I aim to incorporate motivations such as regionalism and ethnicity into a study of the revolution as it was experienced there. Hainan Communist leaders and their mainland counterparts held widely divergent perspectives of the movement’s direction and its path forward. Some perceptions, or misperceptions, on both sides of the narrow Qiongzhou Strait that divided Hainan from the mainland, were grounded in perennial notions about one another’s culture. Some of these misperceptions and prejudices persist today, and continue to shape the way that Hainan’s history is remembered and written.
For more than two millennia, the nearly 13,000 square-mile teardrop-shaped island has been China’s Hainan. Since the Han Empire established a garrison there in the late second century BCE, Hainan has been a part of the Chinese cultural and political realm. While its indigenous inhabitants, known in Chinese as the Li people, have frequently clashed with Han Chinese on the island, Hainan has never produced a noteworthy political or military movement that sought independence from China. There has never been a question as to Hainan’s allegiance and belonging.1 This sets Hainan apart from other troublesome border regions of China, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Taiwan.
And yet the relationship has rarely been a comfortable or mutually beneficial one. Both islander and mainlander have viewed each other with suspicion, the former fearing exploitation and the latter secession or instability. Between 1926 and 1950, the Chinese Communist Party established a political and military presence on Hainan, and even after its success, these enduring frustrations and anxieties continued to define its relationship with the mainland regime. Ultimately, these long-standing trends between Hainan and the mainland have continued to hamper the island’s development and progress, in terms of culture, politics, and economics. This is the history of Hainan’s Communist movement in the context of the first half of the twentieth century. Trends that shaped this movement continue to play out in the island’s politics, its economic potential, and its cultural identities.
Hainan lies just about ten miles off the southern Chinese mainland, with Guangdong’s Leizhou peninsula stretching to nearly touch the island. Leizhou dips into the South China Sea, and continues as an underwater ridge all the way to the northern coast of Hainan. This has made the Hainan or Qiongzhou Strait a dangerous passage for centuries of sailors and fishermen. In May of 1950, Hainan was incorporated into the new Beijing regime of the PRC with the defeat of the Nationalist forces on the island. On the island, an insurgent Communist force had fought the Japanese occupation (1939–1945) as well as the Nationalist forces on the island (1927–1950). In the spring of 1950, they joined with a massive landing operation of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from the mainland to achieve victory. The history and collective memory of the war-weary Hainan Communists was based on the ideal of perseverance and continuity over twenty-three years of struggle, sometimes with no support or communication from the mainland Communists. Fiercely patriotic and eager to be given a provincial seat at the national table (a seat that would not be granted until 1988), the Hainan Communists, like their 1911 revolutionary predecessors, were proud of their local identity, forged in a local struggle with local characteristics.
From the perspective of the mainland Communist landing forces of the spring 1950 campaign, Hainan’s revolutionary success was seen to be not nearly as hard-fought or long-awaited as other conflicts in their recent memory. The mainland Communist Fourth Field Army had reached the southern provinces far more quickly than even the most optimistic plans of the Communist leadership. With some valuable experience gained in previous failed amphibious attacks, they had crossed the narrow Qiongzhou Strait and liberated Hainan in a mere two weeks. Two weeks of fighting, from the mainland forces’ and the PRC leadership’s perspective, brought Hainan under Communist control. In this coup, half of Nationalist territory was won and lost, and Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) and his forces hunkered down on the other half—Taiwan—which some believed would be the next battlefield of the Chinese civil war. Instead, Taiwan was soon to be a Cold War bulwark following the outbreak of the Korean War a month later and the resulting aid of Chiang’s somewhat reluctant but supportive American allies.
The Hainan Communists were dedicated to the national revolution, even though questions of loyalty, commitment, and belief in the revolution would later become an issue. The mainland Communists had been able to supply little or no support through much of that struggle, and the Hainan Column had turned to the island’s local Han and indigenous Li population in an alliance that allowed them to survive in the mountainous southern interior. So deep were the roots of the Hainan Communist movement that it led them to disobey central directives to move their forces off the island following the Japanese defeat in 1945. When the mainland Communist leadership ordered the Hainan Column to abandon the island in 1946, and withdraw their forces north to Shandong, or east to Vietnam, the Hainan command responded this was impossible, and that they respectfully refused to obey the orders. This 1946 disobedience and the anti-localism campaigns of the early PRC represent the culmination of more than two decades in Hainan’s revolutionary movement, and I aim to make sense of this longer history.
The successful military campaign that came in 1950 was due to the cooperation between a massive “people’s navy” composed largely of commandeered or volunteered fishing craft launched from the mainland, with support from the local Hainan Column. Shortly after the victory, as in other newly acquired territories especially in the south, the regional and national administration implemented accelerated and jolting land reform to catch them up with other longer-held regions. The Hainan Communists had held insufficient territory to allow the completion of land reform on the entire island prior to May of 1950. Further, mainland Communist leaders judged that the land reform and redistribution that had been carried out in the limited Communist territories of Hainan was incomplete and too moderate to satisfy national standards.
By 1951, a flood of “southbound cadres” (nanxia ganbu) arrived on Hainan to replace local Hainan cadres and revolutionary veterans. The local cadres’ connections allegedly made them too soft on the island’s landlords and big capitalists. Mutual resentment grew between the old revolutionaries of the Hainan Column and the newly arrived southbound cadres. Many of the new cadres were young urban intellectuals or even students, some from the distant northern reaches of China, now sent into Hainan’s towns and villages to overturn the local order. With the Korean War underway and the implementation of a series of national campaigns, regional and national administrators were suspicious of any local leadership that might obstruct the project of building a unified nation-state. The urgency of rapid industrialization and centralized command overruled the popularity, moderation, and revolutionary credentials of local leaders, like Feng Baiju on Hainan, the man who most embodied the spirit of the Hainan Column.
Through the early 1950s, local leaders around China were systematically removed from positions of power in the “anti-localism” (fan difang zhuyi) campaigns. The culmination of the centralization of political and economic control in Beijing came with the Anti-Rightist Movement (the larger umbrella campaign that encompassed the “Anti-Localism Campaigns”) and then the Great Leap Forward. These two catastrophic events removed from power the moderate and critical voices within the political structure and then implemented one of the most devastating economic campaigns in human history, leading to the starvation of tens of millions by 1961. A generation of local leaders were silenced and sidelined after having helped bring about the military and political victory of the CCP.2 Decades later, vindication would come with the loosening of state economic controls and the granting of provincial status and increased autonomy on Hainan.
Finding the place where Hainan’s Communist movement fits into the greater revolutions and wars of resistance of the first half of the twentieth century requires focusing on the military history of the Hainan Column. Military history is no longer confined to the biographies of eminent generals and their tactical successes and blunders. The works of Gregor Benton, Hans Van de Ven, Edward McCord, Stephen Averill, and others have expanded the discipline to include the political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of modern Chinese military history.3 It is the inspiration and example of these works that drive my own research on this topic. While the biography of Feng Baiju and other leaders of the Communist Hainan Independent Column are important, my examination of the Hainan Communist movement is not limited to a telling of their lives alone. And while the specific operations and fortifications of the Hainan guerrilla forces are relevant to the narrative of the movement, I do not restrict the aim of this study to a military atlas of maneuvers throughout the Communist fight against the Japanese and the Nationalists.
In the early period of academic study of the Chinese revolution by non-Chinese scholars, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a lack of archival access to the Chinese mainland led to an excessive focus on ideology in the form of political and intellectual history. Western political and social scientists were locked out of the PRC, and Chinese Communist historians were likewise politically constrained in the telling of their own recent history. The jingoistic narratives of the Cold War dominated the histories about the first half of the twentieth century throughout the world in this period. In many cases, and due in part to Chinese nationalism and American anxieties about China’s rise in the twenty-first century, simplistic mutual depictions continue in popular culture, though today this type of polemic continues to be produced more out of a desire to rile up a like-minded reader; but it is no longer attributable to a lack of access to sources.
Since the late 1970s, many of the nearly forgotten histories of the Chinese civil war, and the War of Resistance against Japan were collected and compiled through projects like the Wenshi ziliao (roughly translated as “literary and historical materials”), which exploded with other projects in the 1980s, into millions of pages of individual recollections of the wars. Today, oral historians continue their work in China, and they now have access to localities like Hainan: as one example, Sato Shojin of Japan’s Osaka Sangyo University has spent years working on Hainan, seeking an accurate and complete account of the atrocities of the Japanese occupation of Hainan (1939–1945).
Based on personal accounts and increased access to official archival sources, both Chinese and foreign historians have begun to construct a richer historical account of the years that had once been nothing more than a source for Cold War propaganda. Naturally, these and other new histories continue to be driven by the ideology and political concerns of the present, and of the historian. But the recently increased freedom in recounting the history of China during the first half of the twentieth century has allowed for new voices to be added to what was once only the orthodox Western or Chinese account of the rise of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and the CCP.
The new voices have brought new actors onto the stage of the civil war and the War of Resistance. They have served to effectively decenter the narratives of the revolution. While still in the middle of the Cold War, Chalmers Johnson showed the Chinese nationalist origins of resistance and revolutionary energy to be the source of the Communist success.4 In doing this, he broke down the myth of a monolithic, international Communist entity, connected through a tiered system with Moscow at the top, and the tiniest Chinese village at the bottom. (In some powerful currents of political thought, a monolithic Communist history still prevails, owing to myopic scholarship and the institutional inertia of academic and governmental institutions.5) Today, the deconstruction of international monolithic Communist history is being pushed further, past Johnson’s national level and to the subnational nature of revolutionary movements. Abandoning the nation-state as a unit of analysis here does not mean that we should move immediately to the global or international, as some theorists and historians have done. Stephen Averill and others have begun to move us toward an understanding of the local origins of the Chinese Communist movement.6
Regional characters and motivations drove the revolution in its early days, and continued to be a defining force through the civil war and War of Resistance. It was not simply national resistance to the Japanese threat that allowed the Communists to harness this energy and drive them to victory. Our increased access to official and nonofficial sources from wartime China allows the historian to no longer essentialize the experience of the Chinese revolution across the profoundly diverse regions and people within the PRC. Local histories are becoming more and more richly textured with increasing scholarly access to provincial and national archives, as well as to sources like the wenshi ziliao, and in Hainan another similar series called Qiongdao Xinghuo (Hainan Spark). As with any other locality, understanding Hainan requires us to focus on the local actors who have been celebrated and criticized in the national history. In this way, we discover another history, another identity, and even another patriotism. In traveling to China and interacting with regional and peripheral sources of revolutionary history, I discovered a remarkable and inexhaustible wealth of voices and perspectives that have fueled my work. It has been both energizing and daunting to encounter the printed and living history of Hainan.
Some of the major themes and questions that came to the surface and drove my research on Hainan include the center-periphery relationship in China’s Communist revolution; the questions of ideological correctness versus opportunism of regional or national leaders; the shifting itinerary of the revolution’s ideology and adherence to a new or old itinerary; the importance of biography and charismatic leadership within the Chinese revolution versus the social and economic impetus toward revolutionary activity; the interaction of the Chinese revolution with indigenous peoples, and their overlapping or conflicting aims; and others. Central to Hainan’s Communist revolution was the tension between ideological purity and pragmatic survival. The latter was often the path that Feng Baiju and the Hainanese leadership chose, and they took this path in the name of holding aloft the Red flag for more than twenty-three years from their founding days until their final victory.
In chapter 1, I introduce Hainan’s perennial relationship with the mainland, characterized by unrealized hopes for development. Centuries of history saw the formation of a distinct Hainanese culture, which connected its population not only to the Chinese mainland, but also to Southeast Asia and to the distinctive and deep roots of Hainan’s own identity. This chapter aims to sketch out a landscape on which the remainder of the narrative will unfold, and is therefore not a chronological telling of Hainan’s early history. In chapter 2, the more chronological element of the study begins, with a study of the cosmopolitan revolutionaries who helped overthrow the last dynasty of China in 1911 as they gradually shift their political plans from international ambitions, to national service, and finally, to local survival. In chapter 3, the early Communist movement on Hainan is founded in 1926, but becomes increasingly isolated from its mainland CCP leadership. Guangdong warlord, Chen Jitang, loosely affiliated with the Nationalist rulers, nearly annihilates the Hainan Communists. In chapter 4, the Japanese invasion of China in July of 1937 leads to the occupation of Hainan in 1939, and an uneasy alliance between the Hainan Communists and Nationalists. In this alliance, the relative autonomy of both parties from their respective mainland authorities in their negotiations is striking. As on the mainland, this united front soon breaks down, and the conflict between the Nationalists and Communists on Hainan resumes even during the Japanese occupation, as on the mainland. In chapter 5, an alliance with the indigenous Li people of the island’s interior allows for the Communists and the Li to survive in the mountainous southern central region of Hainan. In chapter 6, with the end of the Japanese occupation, the mainland leadership reestablishes contact with the Hainanese Communists after years with no radio or messenger communication. In 1946, in an effort to consolidate its national forces, and in negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, the mainland Communist leadership, then based in Yan’an, orders the Hainan Communists to abandon the island to either northern China or Vietnam (Indochina). By this time, the Hainan Communist movement is so deeply rooted in the island that its leadership refuses to attempt this movement, and communicates their inability and unwillingness to carry out the orders to leave Hainan. In chapter 7, the successful military conquest of Hainan is completed through a combined effort of the local Communists and mainland landing forces. The views of the campaign diverged radically between Hainan and the mainland, and veterans of the campaign hold irreconcilable views of the same events, and perhaps differing views of the revolutionary path forward. In chapter 8, the mainland consolidation of power leads to the further souring of relations between the Hainanese and mainland Communists leaderships. Anti-Localism Campaigns uproot or demobilize the Hainanese political and military leadership, based on accusations of nepotism, “localism,” and overly moderate policies. While limited development of Hainan’s tropical agriculture moved forward in the years that followed, the trauma of this rupture between the two Communist leaderships lasted for more than three decades. To some extent, these bitter roots of the Communist revolution on Hainan continue to shape the island’s remembered past and lived present at the time of writing.
In Haikou Park, Feng Baiju’s memorial pavilion and mausoleum are meticulously groomed with blooming gardens all year round. Feng stands above all other sons and daughters of the island as the symbol of Hainan’s struggles in the twentieth century. I was conducting research for this project when the traditional Qingming Festival or tomb-sweeping holiday was officially reinstated in April 2008, and I strolled to the park to see how the holiday would be observed at Feng’s tomb. Government and military personnel stood in solemn lines and presented Feng with huge wreaths as offerings. Brief speeches recounted Feng’s life, and his contribution to the Hainanese people and the Communist Party. Then, throughout the day, fewer official delegations of young parents and toddlers placed fruit and flowers along the pedestal of Feng’s monument and the nearby pillar commemorating all of Hainan’s revolutionary martyrs.
By the early afternoon, the pavilion was quiet and nearly deserted. I struck up a conversation with two young police officers, since their duty prevented them from retiring with the rest of the crowd for the usual afternoon nap to escape the heat. I had brought “ghost money,” and I told them that I hoped to burn it in front of Feng’s resting place. The senior of the two told me sharply that it was strictly not allowed in the park; the other officer looked less certain. Apparently, there was some room for debate on the point. The younger officer switched from Mandarin to Hainanese as they discussed the matter among themselves.
“Ah, you’re Hainanese,” I said, with some relief, because their People’s Armed Police uniforms meant that they might not be locals. They turned back to me. I realized my interjection might have been interpreted as a challenge to their Hainanese loyalty: How could they not allow this little ritual? The officer who had initially forbidden the offering turned and walked briskly to his police booth. He returned with his canteen and said with some officiousness, “Fine, you can burn it. Here.” The spot he seemed to choose casually was centered exactly in front of Feng’s tomb in the back of the pavilion. I had brought no matches, and so I imposed further on them to break the law against having an open flame in the park by using the officer’s cigarette lighter. Then, as an impromptu ceremonial group, we took a quarter hour to burn two bundles of money, mostly in silence. As the fire dwindled, the senior officer looked to me and the other officer: “Done?” We both nodded, and his overbearing demeanor disappeared as he knelt and reverently scooped one, two, three handfuls of water from his canteen onto the tiny pile of ashes.
This is my effort to tell a chapter in the history of Hainan, where local identities and loyalties persist, and where a regional patriotism still prevails. As in any large country, regional and provincial loyalties develop and can be a source of both pride and conflict with the national culture and the central government. In framing the narrative of the Hainanese revolutionary movement, the Chinese nation and the mainland Chinese Communist movement must play an important part. The perspectives of the Hainanese and mainland leadership are both important, and examining them reveals that not only the power relations, but also the perceptions were, and are, asymmetrical. Actions are misinterpreted from both sides, and actors sometimes move easily from one side to the other. Much of this work examines a local movement that aimed to act in a way that embodied patriotism and the greatest loyalty to China and to the central Party authorities. And yet the movement’s work was observed with a wary eye from the Party center, with concern that the local group was promoting a local agenda that was essentially separatist.
Taiwan is an obvious comparison in any study of Hainan. Taiwan’s history and its present political status are, of course, hotly disputed, and its relationship with the mainland is still a major source of tension and volatility. From the perspective of mainland Chinese regimes, Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Tibet are examples of why regionalism and local identities must always be closely monitored, and maintained as subservient to the larger national cultural and political agendas. Hainan, as a southern island far from the political center of China, has also sometimes been suspected by central authorities of working toward a separatist or “localist” goal.
Hainanese regional identity is strong, but it is not separatist, nor has it ever been. The problem of excessive local autonomy is still seen from the mainland within the context of separatist realities elsewhere, and so although there is no independence movement on Hainan, movements toward increased autonomy are closely monitored in Beijing, especially based on the island’s history and the honored heroes of its Communist revolution. Perception and misperception of cultural and revolutionary identities are therefore at the center of this work.