China's Lonely Revolution: The Local Communist Movement of Hainan Island, 1926–1956 by Jeremy A. Murray

Abstract

Reviewed by: China's Lonely Revolution: The Local Communist Movement of Hainan Island, 1926–1956 by Jeremy A. Murray Fabio Lanza Jeremy A. Murray. China's Lonely Revolution: The Local Communist Movement of Hainan Island, 1926–1956. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. 237 pp. $85.00 (cloth), $25.95 (paper). China's Lonely Revolution is the first study in English of the Communist movement on Hainan Island, from the unpromising founding of the local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1926 to the first few years after the liberation of the island by a joint offensive of mainland forces and the Hainan column in 1950. In this well-researched monograph, Jeremy A. Murray provides another vivid example showing that the Chinese Revolution was not a univocal, centralized, or even well-coordinated affair. Rather, the long and complex struggles of Communist fighters—as well as all the other non-Communist actors who joined them—from the 1920s up to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War look more like a series of "revolutions," sharing overarching, if continuously evolving, goals but embedded in local situations and expressed in specific and contingent practices. This is already enough to recommend the book. Murray focuses on the Hainanese character of the Hainan Communist revolution, clearly pushing against an official "mainland" narrative that, since the early 1950s, has obscured the role of local leaders and islands activists who, basically with no support from and often with no connection to the central CCP, kept the revolutionary struggle going. As the Hainan leaders proudly declared in 1950, "for twenty-three years, the Red Flag did not fall" (1) on the tropical island. Murray's analysis of these 23 years is often cast against the knowledge that this regional emphasis would eventually create problems for Hainan CCP leaders in the early 1950s, when they would be accused of "localism" and often marginalized in the implementation of center-driven policies; he thus connects the political struggles of the early People's Republic of China (PRC) with the long history of "pragmatism, improvisation, and isolation" (1) that characterized the Hainan revolutionary experience. After a mad rush through centuries of Hainan's relations with the mainland in the first introductory chapter, the book follows a more or less chronological sequence: Murray describes the shifting political prospects of Hainan revolutionaries in the 1910s and early 1920s, moving then to the founding of the CCP and the early, troubled history of the Communist movement in Hainan, which, like its mainland counterpart, was almost completely annihilated by Nationalist repression. The Japanese occupation led to a very unstable alliance between the two Chinese parties, but it was a different alliance that would be crucial for the fate of the revolution, that between the Communists and the indigenous Li (黎) people who inhabited the island's interior. This was, as Murray notes, one of the main factors that allowed for the Hainan column—as the local CCP group was [End Page E-13] called—to survive and establish solid bases, but it was also an alliance that was declaredly anti-Guomindang, as it was the Nationalists (and not the Japanese) who had exercised unprecedented pressure on Li territories. The second half of the book is by far the most interesting and revealing, as Murray describes three important moments in the history of the Hainan Communist movement and of its relationship with the larger revolution taking place on the mainland. Chapter 6 details the refusal on the part of the Hainan fighters to leave the island and join the main force in the north of China, as ordered by the central CCP, a refusal that was motivated by practical and political considerations and that left the local forces almost completely isolated in fighting for their own survival during the civil war. The liberation of Hainan in 1950, when People's Liberation Army troops crossed the treacherous Qiongzhou Strait to join the local Hainan guerrilla fighters, is taken up in chapter 7; the military conquest was a brief affair, but a more lasting, if theoretical, battle was fought over how to construct the narrative of liberation...