SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. xii, 346 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-5383-5.
Han Xiaorong’s new book is a rigorously researched biography of Wei Baqun, a rural activist from Dongli village in Guangxi Province’s Donglan County. Before Wei was assassinated by his nephew in 1932, he led a peasant movement that, at its height in 1929, encompassed four counties of the Right River region. After his death, he became embedded in local folklore as a “Red God.” And, since the mid-1950s, the Beijing government has elevated him to the status of a Zhuang hero who united the Zhuang and Han people, who brought the Zhuang into the national revolution, and who helped integrate one of Guangxi’s remote regions into the Chinese nation. In 2009 Wei was elected as one of the “one hundred heroes and models” who had made “outstanding contributions to the founding of the People’s Republic of China” (245).
The deified Wei Baqun, however, is the product of a good deal of airbrushing. For one thing, he came from a landlord family and was a member of the Guomindang for longer than the three years he was a formal member of the Communist Party. Before and after he was admitted to the Party, his superiors complained about his leadership style; he was said “to lead the people like a hero would lead his worshippers” (125). He was also a very violent man who engaged in “excessive killing, looting, burning and kidnapping” (253); he treated defectors from his movement brutally, and murdered two of his four wives. Violence had become intrinsic to the Communist movement in the late 1920s, but Wei’s brutality seems to have been exceptional. Hao Xiaorong notes that it went beyond what was tolerated by the Party centre (207) and “had a destructive effect” on the Right River movement; it derived, he says, from a “small-time bandit pragmatism” that pervaded the local culture and was responsible for Wei’s own death in 1932 (253).
One of Han’s purposes is to explain the significant discrepancies between Party representations of Wei Baqun and the Wei who emerges from the historical records of the Donglan movement. Chapter 8 of Red God provides a clear and convincing explanation for the discrepancies. In the 1950s, the PRC government chose to revive Zhuang identity in Guangxi Province, and the reconstruction of Wei as a model Zhuang Communist was designed to serve that revival. Wei’s flaws as a revolutionary and that he was as much Han as Zhuang were brushed aside; “he was transformed into the most prestigious Communist of the Right River region” who mediated between and united the Zhuang and the Han (236, 247).
The book’s first seven chapters consist of a meticulously documented account of Wei’s progress as a rural radical, first in Donglan county and then the broader Right River base area. The author has used local folklore and the legends woven around Wei’s life to understand his personality and character; it is clear that Donglan villagers regarded Wei as first and foremost a Donglan man with deep roots in his home district and deserving of a proud place among the pantheon of immortalized warrior heroes who had defended the interests of Donglan folk over the centuries. Han Xiaorong also gives careful attention to the important role played by the region’s schools in cultivating the “rural intellectuals” who served as the backbone of Wei’s movement. The most significant factor shaping the history of the Donglan peasant movement, however, is militarism; the movement’s progress was
at all times contingent on the alignment at any one time of military factions, local militia, warlord armies and, from the mid-1920s, the Nationalist and Communist armies. It was drawn into broader conflicts when its enemies sought military help from outside the county, forcing Wei also to seek help from friendly militarists both inside and outside Guangxi. The local cultures of violence that for centuries had blossomed in this remote frontier region were cannon fodder for the wider conflicts that, in the end, destroyed the Right River movement.
Han Xiaorong’s Red God must count as one of the best English-language studies we have of an early local peasant movement that became connected to the Chinese Communist movement after 1927. Han is at pains to show that his is not a local study, that Wei’s movement from its beginnings was much bigger than local, and that it serves as a case study of “the complicated relations between the center and the periphery” (11). He gives great importance to Wei’s visits to Shanghai and Canton. They connected him to the centres of “national political ferment,” and he took back to Donglan the new ideas and strategies he learned in the big cities (54). He says that in 1929, when Wei became “an integral part” of the Communists’ Soviet government in western Guangxi, he “upgraded himself from a local leader to a national one” (164). More than that, Wei’s membership of the Communist Party meant that his movement “became part of the global Communist movement directed by the Comintern in Moscow” (252). These and other connections that Han tries to make between national centres and the peripheral Right River region are less than convincing. So is his suggestion that Wei and his comrades “facilitated the partial amalgamation of two distinct cultures: the imported revolutionary culture and the indigenous culture of the rebels and bandits” (202). But we are given no evidence of local cultures being changed by Party policies. The centre-local interaction was really limited to the influence of the centre on the ideas of Wei and the “rural intellectuals” who joined his movement.
Neither the Donglan nor wider Right River peasant movements were ever effectively integrated into the wider Communist movement largely because there was not the time to integrate them. The Red Army had no intention of staying in Guangxi; it pulled out of the Right River Soviet in November 1930, having been there for less than 18 months, and it left Wei and his forces virtually defenceless. Han Xiaorong has very effectively demonstrated the enormous odds against revolutionary success in the wilds of warlord-ridden Guangxi; this is one of the strengths of his study. Yet he insists that Wei’s movement deserves to be remembered as much more than a failure. He concedes that Wei Baqun failed to deliver his promise “to bring happiness to Donglan,” but he says that the promise did not die when Wei died in 1932 (257). Han Xiaorong clearly admires the flawed revolutionary. He sometimes attributes to Wei the godlike qualities bestowed on him by both the Donglan locals and the Party.
Pauline Keating
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
pp. 651-653