Hainan is the smallest province of the
People's Republic of China (PRC). Although the province comprises
some two hundred islands scattered among three archipelagos
off the southern coast, all but three percent of its land
mass is on Hainan Island (Hainan Dao), from which the province
takes its name. To say "Hainan" in China usually
refers to Hainan Island itself. The PRC government claims
Hainan's territories to extend to the southern Spratly Islands,
Paracel Islands and other disputed marine territory. Hainan
is also the largest Special Economic Zone laid out by Chinese
leader Deng Xiaoping in the late 1980s.
Hainan
Island is located in the South China Sea, separated from
Guangdong's Leizhou Peninsula to the north by a shallow
and narrow strait. It has an area of 33,920 square kilometers
in this southernmost province of China which, with a total
land mass of about 35,000 square kilometers, is also the
smallest. For centuries Hainan was part of Guangdong province,
but in 1988 this resource-rich tropical island became a
separate province. The capital is Haikou. The Island is
home to a new strategic naval harbor that has been dug through
the mountainside.
Hainan Island was called the Pearl Cliffs (Zhuyá),
Fine Jade Cliffs (Qióngyá), and the Fine Jade
Land (Qióngzhou). The latter two gave rise to the
province's abbreviation, Qióng (in Simplified Chinese),
referring to the greenery cover on the island.
Hainan
first enters written Chinese history in 110 BC, when the
Han Dynasty established a military garrison there. Settlement
by mainlanders was slow however and from early on the island
was considered to be fit only for exiles. It was in this
period that the Li people arrived from Guangxi Province
and displaced the island's aboriginal Austronesian-speaking
peoples.
In
Eastern Wu of the Three Kingdoms Period, Hainan was the
Zhuya Commandery.
Under
the Song Dynasty, Hainan came under the control of Guangxi
Province, and for the first time large numbers of Han Chinese
arrived, settling mostly in the north. Under the Yuan Dynasty
(AD 1206-1368) it became an independent province, but was
placed under Guangdong Province during the Ming Dynasty
in 1370. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, large
numbers of Han from Fujian and Guangdong began migrating
to Hainan, pushing the Li into the highlands in the southern
half of the island. In the eighteenth century, the Li rebelled
against the government, which responded by bringing in mercenaries
from the Miao people regions of Guizhou Province. Many of
the Miao settled on the island and their descendants live
in the western highlands to this day.
In 1906 the Chinese Republican leader Sun Yat-sen proposed
that Hainan become a separate province.
Hainan
was historically part of Guangdong Province and Guangxi
Province, being as such, it was the Ch'iung-yai or Qiongya
Circuit in 1912 (the establishment of the Republic of China).
In 1921, it was planned to become a Special Administrative
Region; in 1944, it became Hainan Special Administrative
Region with 16 counties containing the South China Sea Islands.
During
the 1920s and 30s Hainan was a hotbed of Communist activity,
especially after a bloody crackdown in Shanghai, the Republic
of China in 1927 drove many Communists into hiding. The
Communists and the Li natives fought a vigorous guerrilla
campaign against the Japanese occupation of Hainan (1939-45),
but in retaliation over one third of the male population
were killed by the Japanese. Feng Baiju led the Hainan Independent
Column of fighters throughout the 1930s and 1940s. After
the Japanese surrender in 1945 the Nationalist Party (KMT)
re-established control. Hainan was one of the last areas
of China controlled by the Republic of China. From March
to May 1950, the Landing Operation on Hainan Island captured
the island for the Chinese communists. Feng Baiju and his
column of guerrilla fighters played an essential role in
scouting for the landing operation and coordinated their
own offensive from their jungle bases on the island. This
allowed the Hainan takeover to be successful where the Jinmen
and Dengbu assaults had failed in the previous fall. The
takeover was made possible by the presence of a local guerrilla
force that was lacking on Jinmen, Dengbu, and Taiwan. Hence,
while many observers of the Chinese civil war thought that
the fall of Hainan to the Communists would be followed shortly
by the fall of Taiwan, the lack of any Communist guerrilla
force on Taiwan and its sheer distance from the mainland
made this impossible, as did the arrival of the US 7th fleet
in the Taiwan Strait after the outbreak of the Korean War
in June.
