SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2017. x, 237 pp., [28] pp. of plates. (Map, illustrations.) US$85.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-6531-9.
One of the results of recent scholarship on the Communist base areas during the war against Japan has been an appreciation of the diversity among areas in respect to historical development, policies, and organizational methods. Some base areas, such as Shaan-Gan-Ning, have been extensively studied, while others have not. Jeremy A. Murray’s work seeks to remedy this situation by his study of the Communist Party on Hainan Island.
This is an ambitious work. The core of the book concerns the development of the Communist movement during the period of the Anti-Japanese War and the Civil War (1937–1949). However, the author also devotes considerable attention to the turmoil that followed the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in order to understand the roots of the movement on the island as well as providing a somewhat briefer treatment of the impact of the movement’s pre-revolutionary development on the early stages of post-1949 Communist rule on the island. In these discussions Murray draws upon a rich variety of sources that range from memoirs of Western observers to document collections and archival materials from China.
The dominant theme running through the study is the argument that the nature of island politics and the Communist movement both have been shaped by a history of isolation from the mainland. This situation conditioned the policies during the 1920s and 1930s when the party took root on Hainan, but most importantly during the Anti-Japanese War when the Communist movement lost touch with the party centre in north China. Although its policies generally followed the broad outlines of the nominal united front with the Kuomintang during these years, under the guidance of a local leadership, the party pursued policies that Murray characterizes with such terms as “pragmatism,” “improvisation,” and “independence.” Indeed, at one point, in 1946, the Party ignored orders from the centre to move north to support efforts on the mainland.
The bulk of Murray’s discussion traces the history of the Communist Party as it endeavours to build a movement in the environment of Japanese occupation and civil war while relatively isolated from the national leadership in Yan’an and to sustain its distinctive policies in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. In the end, however, the centre reasserted its authority. Party orthodoxy highlights the saga of the invasion of Hainan by troops from the North in 1950 while slighting the earlier efforts of the Party to sustain a “long and difficult insurgency” (144). Finally, with the arrival of cadres from the north and the anti-localism campaign, the Hainan Communist Party is brought under the control of the central authorities.
The strength of this book is the skillful tracing of the development of the party in relation to the broader currents shaping the political environment of these years such as the united front, the Japanese invasion, or the tensions with the central party authorities. What receives relatively little attention is the relationship of the Hainan party to society; specifically the nature of the political and economic policies pursued to build its political/military base. The development of the alliance with the Li minority is traced, but its nature is never elaborated upon. In other places, Murray does mention “popular policies,” “land reform,” resistance to the Japanese and “efficient organization” as important elements contributing to the Party’s popularity. However, there is very little discussion of the specific content of the policies pursued in these areas.
This is unfortunate. Since the publication in the 1960s of Chalmers Johnson’s study of the causes for Communist success, a rich literature has emerged seeking to understand the organizational techniques and policies that contributed to the growth of the party in the different environments of the various base areas. The importance of this study would have been greatly enhanced if the author had chosen to explore in greater detail the nature of these techniques and policies and had related them to the conclusions of previous studies of other base areas.
However, to be fair, China’s Lonely Revolution should not be judged by might-have-beens, but by what Jeremy Murray has actually accomplished. And in this respect, the book is an impressively researched study that provides many valuable insights that hopefully will stimulate more work on this little-known part of the story of the Communist revolution in China.
Steven M. Goldstein
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA