I just finished reading Chan Sui-jeung’s East River Column: Hong Kong Guerrillas in the Second World War and After (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) and have a new appreciation for the brave men and women of Hong Kong and southern China during and after the war.
Hong Kong is not known for its military strength. After all, it doesn’t have its own army, navy, or air force. But during World War II, hundreds of men and women in Hong Kong and parts of Guangdong province joined together to fight the Japanese occupation and help hundreds of people escape Hong Kong for Free China (those parts of China that weren’t occupied by Japan).
I’d read about these guerrillas in Tim Luard’s new book, Escape from Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 2012), but Chan takes a closer look at the organized group that was affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.
Although WWII interrupted the brewing civil war in China, these guerrillas worked closely with KMT officials and foreigners. What I found most interesting–and thought-provoking–were the sections of this book that narrated what happened after the war. Some of the East River Column leadership went on to hold important posts in the new People’s Republic of China. But it was their collaboration with the KMT and foreigners during the war that would come back to hurt them during the Cultural Revolution.
This book led me to wonder how China would have fared had the PRC leadership in Beijing allowed the Cantonese to hold high positions during the early decades of the PRC instead of banishing them for being different from the rest of the China (a history of working with foreigners, speaking a completely different language from Mandarin, and a geographic distance far from Beijing).
With the growing tensions between Hong Kong and the mainland, it’ll be interesting to see what will happen this time around.
To side track, I am wondering what would have happened had the long march ended with nothing. Would China have been better off today or worse? Not that I am a fan of any ism, certainly not one starting with m. Just wondering.
Good question! I suppose it could have turned out fine had the Great Leap Forward not started two decades of terrible policies. The Cantonese in the early 1950s were against radical land reform and wanted the landowners to be able to keep their farms. Even with the moderate reforms, according to SJ Chan, the peasants would have fared a lot better than they had pre-1949. But that wasn’t acceptable to Beijing. And the rest is history.
I think your opinion of the CCP’s attitude toward the Cantonese is rather too harsh. For all the “differences” there may be between the Cantonese and the rest of China, the former are most definitely considered Chinese.
And I wouldn’t make too much of the current brouhaha between Hong Kong and the Mainland. A large part of this stems from the fact that Hong Kongers are seeing the wealth and privilege that they’ve enjoyed over their dirty, uneducated compatriots on the Mainland for so long being eroded, and there is a sense amongst people that Hong Kongers are getting their comeuppance for the open contempt they’ve shown towards Mainlanders over the years. Of course, the problem is not helped by the Mainlanders who flock to Hong Kong to take advantage of the public services there, but that is only one manifestation of the underlying issue here.
The conflict should blow over soon without much incident; even the recalcitrant Taiwanese are showing ever stronger indications of moving toward the Mainland, as the latest election results there show.
This sounds great – I know that Mao was big into the use of guerrilla warfare (his thoughts on the subject have been used by everyone under the sun since), but I didn’t know anything about their use in Hong Kong.
Where do you get all these amazing books from?
The Cantonese, I guess, were only useful when they were needed to hold up the free parts of China during WWII. This column was affiliated with the CCP, but was more of an independent force. They didn’t hold dogmatic study sessions, but rather spoke about independence. The KMT was so corrupt, so they didn’t want to affiliate with them.
This book is special because I knew SJ Chan many years ago. He and his wife were like my surrogate parents when I first moved to Hong Kong at the age of 19. His other passion is the Jews in China, so we spoke often about that. Sadly, when I moved back to Hong Kong in ’94, I called them once but then got side-tracked with my marriage and lost touch.