Culturing Revolution: The Local Communists of China’s Hainan Island
Jeremy Murray
Introduction and Summary for Doctoral Dissertation
University of California, San Diego
In May of 1950, the new Beijing regime of the People’s Republic of China defeated the Nationalist forces on Hainan Island and incorporated the island into the administration of the Communist government. 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).
The triumphant Hainan Column proclaimed that for “twenty-three years, the Red flag never fell.” The Hainan Communists were dedicated to the national revolution, and yet through their struggle, they had sunk roots deep into the island’s soil. 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 indigenous Li population in an alliance that allowed them to survive in the island’s mountainous southern interior.
When the mainland Communist leadership ordered the Hainan Column to abandon the island in 1946, and withdraw their forces north to Shandong, or southeast to Vietnam, the Hainan command responded that this was impossible, and that they respectfully refused to obey the orders.
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, and the local Hainan Column. Shortly after the victory, as in other newly acquired territories, the regional and national administration implemented accelerated land reform. The territory held by the Hainan Communists prior to May of 1950 was insufficient to allow the completion of land reform on the island, and further, the reform and redistribution that had been carried out was judged incomplete and too moderate to satisfy national standards.
By 1951, a flood of “southbound cadres” arrived on Hainan to replace local cadres, whose local 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, sent into 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 were systematically removed from positions of power in the “anti-localism campaigns.” The culmination of the centralization of political and economic control in Beijing came with the Anti-Rightist Movement (the larger umbrella that encompassed the “anti-localism campaigns”) and the Great Leap Forward. These two catastrophic events respectively removed from power the moderate and critical voices within the political structure and then implemented perhaps the most devastating economic campaign in human history, leading to the starvation of tens of millions by 1961. A generation of local leaders had been silenced after they had helped bring about the military and political success of the Communist Party in China. Years later, vindication would come with the loosening of state economic controls and the granting of provincial status and greatly increased autonomy on Hainan. Today, the island is the most vaunted vacation destination of China, and its regional military importance in the South China Sea disputes gives it a pivotal role in regional politics.
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. While the biography of Feng Baiju and other leaders of the Communist Hainan Independent Column are important, this 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, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, 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 People’s Republic of China, 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, and for the most part, they still do in popular culture. In the People’s Republic of China, analysis of the military history of the Communists rise to power was restricted following the persecution of the artists and intellectuals in the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, and through the Cultural Revolution, which imposed an intellectual and artistic straightjacket on Chinese society.
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, 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: Sato Shojin of Japan 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 of historians in the West and in China. 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 increased freedom in recounting the military history of China in 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 and the Chinese Communist Party.
The new voices have brought new actors onto the stage of the Civil War and the War of Resistance. They have served to effectively de-center the Maoist narrative of the war and 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. 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.
This deconstruction of the monolithic nature of Communism can be pushed further, past Johnson’s national level. It was not simply a national Chinese resistance to the Japanese threat that allowed the Communists to harness this energy and drive them to victory. Our increased access to official and non-official sources from wartime China demand that we do not simplify the experience of the Chinese revolution from one region to another.
Understanding Hainan, like any other locality, requires us to focus on the local actors who have been celebrated and criticized in the national history.
