Civil War in Guangxi by Andrew G. Walder

Author:Andrew G. Walder
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fengshan County

This county on the western border of Hechi Prefecture had a population that was overwhelmingly Zhuang.1 Its overall death toll of 1,331 was well above average, but with a population close to 98,000 its death rate of 13.6 per thousand was the second highest in Guangxi, more than triple the provincial average.

Two features of Fengshan’s history influenced events in 1968. First, the county had briefly been at the center of Guangxi’s only Communist base area.2 In late 1927 Communist forces in the region established a base on the border between Donglan and Fengshan counties in the name of the Zhuang Peasant Movement. The base later expanded into neighboring Lingyun and Bose counties and dropped its identification with poor Zhuang peasants. The Red 7th Army was established there and grew to 10,000 soldiers before marching east to join Mao Zedong’s Jiangxi base area in 1930, leading quickly to the collapse of the Communist movement in the region.3 This gave Fengshan a large cohort of Red Army veterans, many of whom returned to the county to be incorporated into leadership positions at all levels during the 1950s.4

The second relevant feature of Fengshan’s history is that it was the site of a stubborn guerrilla insurgency of remnant Nationalist forces that resisted the imposition of the new Communist government established in 1950. At its height, this “Fengshan Anti-Communist Salvation Corps” (Fengshan fangong jiuguo jun) had more than 2,000 armed fighters. This local security threat was not eliminated until the end of 1952.5

These two features of local history became entangled in May 1968, when the PAD falsely charged that the large rebel insurgency threatening them, led by Red Army veterans, was in fact the reincarnation of the old “Anti-Communist Salvation Corps.” This reverberated across Guangxi after the provincial Military District eagerly embraced this characterization and charged that the April 22 faction was fronting for anti-Communist insurgencies throughout Guangxi. This was the core element of the charges that unleashed massacres of April faction activists together with stigmatized “four type” households.6

Fengshan’s rebel factions formed (as described near the end of chapter 3) over the question of whether two former county leaders should be punished for actions during the Great Leap Forward that created and then exacerbated a local famine. Rebel groups founded by Red Army veterans led the attacks on the two, whose actions had devastated the county, killing close to 10 percent of its population.7 The county’s published annals contain a description of horrific events that occurred only six or seven years before: people eating bark and leaves, fleeing the county to beg, entire families starving to death, rats eating corpses, families selling children for food, and even instances of cannibalism.8 The charges brought against these former county leaders—who had been promoted to higher office despite their actions—resonated with many rural residents. They also appealed to leaders at all levels who had been punished as “right-wing elements” for resisting the disastrous policies.

Factions formed after the PAD declared that criticism of Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward was politically reactionary.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.