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RED GOD: Wei Baqun and His Peasant Revolution in Southern China, 1894-1932. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. By Xiaorong Han. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014. xii, 346 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-5383-5.
Han Xiaorong's new book is a rigorously researched biography of Wei Baqun, a rural activist from Dongli village in Guangxi Province's Donglan County. Before Wei was assassinated by his nephew in 1932, he led a peasant movement that, at its height in 1929, encompassed four counties of the Right River region. After his death, he became embedded in local folklore as a "Red God." And, since the mid-1950s, the Beijing government has elevated him to the status of a Zhuang hero who united the Zhuang and Han people, who brought the Zhuang into the national revolution, and who helped integrate one of Guangxi's remote regions into the Chinese nation. In 2009 Wei was elected as one of the "one hundred heroes and models" who had made "outstanding contributions to the founding of the People's Republic of China" (245).
The deified Wei Baqun, however, is the product of a good deal of airbrushing. For one thing, he came from a landlord family and was a member of the Guomindang for longer than the three years he was a formal member of the Communist Party. Before and after he was admitted to the Party, his superiors complained about his leadership style; he was said "to lead the people like a hero would lead his worshippers" (125). He was also a very violent man who engaged in "excessive killing, looting, burning and kidnapping" (253); he treated defectors from his movement brutally, and murdered two of his four wives. Violence had...