Red Only Western Guangxi and a Small Part of Yunnan
CHAPTER ONE Frontier Youth 1894–1914 ei Baqun’s birthplace, Donglan County of Guangxi Province, was a Wfrontier region in more than one sense. It was not far from China’s southern border with Vietnam. In Wei Baqun’s time, travelers from Donglan would often choose to pass through Vietnam in order to reach Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Wei Baqun himself took that route at least twice. The border between Guangxi and Vietnam could be easily crossed partly because neither the French colonial government in Vietnam nor the local Guangxi militarists took the area seriously. The French concentrated their attention on Yunnan rather than Guangxi, whereas the leaders of Guangxi thought that the regions to the east and north were much more important than the southern borders.1 Donglan was also very close to the border dividing Guangxi from three other Chinese provinces: Yunnan, Guizhou, and Hunan, making it a frontier county of a frontier province (Map 1.1). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Donglan fit well the stereotypes of a typical frontier region in China. First of all, it was a multiethnic area. The dominant ethnic group, of which Wei Baqun was a member, was the Turen (which means natives) or Zhuang, whose ancestors, known as Yue, Bai- yue, Luoyue, Xi’ou, Wuhu, Liliao, and Lang in different periods and different places, used to occupy a large part of southern China. By the early twentieth century, however, the Zhuang heartland had shrunk so much that it covered only western Guangxi and a small part of Yunnan.
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