I recently had the pleasure of reading an excellent book, The Great March- the real truth behind the story which made Mao’s China, by Ed Jocelyn and Andrew McEwan, and one of the main things which so struck me was the ethnic diversity of China- not just in Yunnan Province but even further North, through into Gansu, Qinghai, and Shanxi Provinces.
China, like Russia and to an extent Spain are all deeply divided nations traditionally- many Spaniards have often held the belief that the lack of a strong government in Madrid will cause devolution, and ultimately secession for minorities such as the Aragonese, Catalans, and Basques. Indeed, this point was proven during the Spanish Civil War when Euskadi, the Basque Country, was practically independent.
Perhaps China’s uniqueness in its division is the fact that even among the Han Chinese, there are many dialects so mutually unintelligible that one could technically count them as seperate languages (Shanghainese? Mandarin? Cantonese?)- but also the sheer number of ethnic groups, which far surpasses the mere fifty-five officially recognised by the government in Beijing.
As in the Spanish Civil War, China devolved into numerous areas of de-facto control or fully blown independence in some cases. As Peter Fleming’s famous book about his journeys through Turkestan stated, by 1936, the Nationalist Chinese governor of Xinjang was practically a ruler in his own right. Earlier, the region had been declared an independent ‘nation of East Turkestan’.
Just a look at one of my favourite sites, www.worldstatesmen.org, shows the amount of different warlords ruling the different Chinese provinces. This source (http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/chinesehistory/pgp/sheridan.htm) states that many of the apparently pro-Nationalist Chinese generals lacked nationalism. Probably explains why so many of them ruled with their own little cliques- and also why so many of the non-Han Chinese were able to achieve some kind of limited self rule.
When I first heard about Chinese Warlords, I immediately assumed they were some of the vast and impenetrable stories in that pantheon of classical Chinese literature a Westerner can never understand, unless they can decipher the cacophonic squeaks of the Peking Opera, that is.
They were also mentioned briefly in Bertolluci’s excellent film The Last Emperor (such a sad film!)- anyway, coming back to the matter in hand, I read in this book of mine that the Long Marchers encountered a lot of problems in Sichuan Province around 1936, because the local Yi people hated any Han intruders, be they Communist or Nationalist. What interests me is that the book goes on to mention that the Yi were so fierce that not only were they able to seize thousands of rifles from the Red Army, but they even stole so much that one scout regiment returned back without even their clothes!
The Yi were so fierce, indeed, that Mao had to sign a pact known as the Yihai alliance with the Yi warlord Xiao Yedan, in the form of one of his generals becoming blood brothers with him. Now, how an ethnic minority about whom most people probably now very little managed to force the Red Army into submission through an alliance astounds me. This one tribe did what all Chiang Kai-Shek’s horses and all Chiang Kai-Shek’s men couldn’t do- near defeat the Red Army. The Mongols and Tibetans have had some pretty fierce fighters, but the Yi people, numbering 2.5 million only today?
It is surprising how little info I can find online or anywhere else about this event and these Yi fighters- I would have thought that for an event as large as the Long March for China, the pact would have been celebrated with ridiculous propaganda slogans, stylised portraits and the like. Here’s all I’ve been able to find in terms of propaganda-
http://www.liuhuan.com/blog/uploads/200508/12_211430_74.jpg (statue of the two blood brothers). Can’t find any photos of Yedan, though. Shame, really. Would have been interesting to see, as well as the statue in the link above suggesting his having a rather snazzy hat.
Talk about historical trivia…
Oh, and for anyone else interested in Chinese History-
You thought Chinese Warlords were dead? Think again! Here’s one blogging straight from 1941, apparrently ;D
http://yanxishan.wordpress.com/about/
^ The Yan Xishan Blog, Notes from 1941 China’s most noteworthy warlord
