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by governors and generals striving to grasp independent power, and China was plunged into bloody civil war. Guangdong Province, the birth-place of the republican movement, immediately proclaimed itself independent. Sun Yat-sen, the "Father of the Republic", was elected generalissimo, and in 1924 the Kuomintang (the People's Party) was formed. Upon the death of Dr. Sun in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek, backed by his modernized army, emerged as the Kuomintang (KMT) leader, and with assistance from Communist factions began campaigns against the north which culminated in the fall of Shanghai in 1927.
Choosing not to expropriate the capitalist bankers in Shanghai as demanded by the Communists, the KMT and Communists became bitter rivals which re-ignited armed struggle in south China. Fuelled by Communist propaganda, there came a genuine uprising of the peasantry against the KMT for failure to deliver promised tax and land reforms throughout the southern provinces. As part of this general uprising, the first group of “freedom fighters" appeared on Hainan in 1927 and staged guerilla warfare on the island until Liberation, twenty-three years later (Fairfax-Cholmeley, 1963).
Although armed conflicts between Peking and southern forces had occurred previously on Hainan such as those which led to the capitulation of General Lung's army in 1918 (Moninger, 1919), fighting was confined to the soldiery. However, the Communist tactics brought the conflict to the common citizens by inciting peasants to take up arms against the oppressive gentry and greedy merchants. The effects of lightning raids caused havoc in northern Hainan: numerous villages were abandoned, others sacked and reduced to ash-strewn rubble, and large tracts of farming land were deserted (McClure, 1934b).
In fact, the revolutionary play, Red Detachment of Women, was loosely based on incidents which occurred in Hainan in 1931. At a bridge about one kilometre south of the present Xinglong Overseas Chinese State Farm, a guerilla band led by Hong Chang-qing assassinated Nan Ba-tian, a cruel landlord. In reprisal, the landlord's forces captured and executed the guerilla leader. However, a slave girl, Wu Qing-hua, took his place as commander and