His original name was Feng Chi-chou, and he comes from the small village of Ya-tai in Ling-chiao hsiang on Hainan Island, where his family were stonecutters, not far from Ch’iung-shan, the principal city of the northeastern hsien of the same name.
In 1925 Feng graduated from the Sixth Normal School in Ch’iung-shan and then sought further education on the mainland, going to Shanghai, where from 1925 to 1926 he studied at Ta-hsia University. He was expelled from the university in 1926 for his participation in the student movement, possibly in connection with the May 30th (1925) Movement, which initiated a period of unrest among student groups throughout China.
After his expulsion from Ta-hsia, Feng returned to Hainan where in 1926 he joined the CCP. In the next year he became chairman of a sub-committee subordinate to the Hainan (Ch’iung-yai) District Committee, the highest organ of the CCP in Hainan, which was then under the direction of Huang Hsueh-tseng. Feng immediately began organizing guerrilla units among the Hainan peasantry. The next three years of tension and conflict within the Party membership on the mainland were reflected in Hainan. Sometime between 1927 and 1929 Huang Hsueh-tseng was arrested and executed by the Nationalist authorities, leaving Feng to eliminate rival groups and put his own in power. Having initially become a member of the Hainan District Committee (1927), in 1929 he succeeded in gathering a gToup of his own supporters and convened a conference in Ting-an hsien (to the south of Ch’iung-shan) at which he organized his own Hainan Special Party Committee. The timing of these actions coincided or followed closely upon the expulsion from the CCP on the mainland of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the first Party general secretary, and when Feng finally gained control of the Party Committee in Hainan, he expelled his rivals as “Trotskyites.”
Feng remained in Hainan for some 20 years, making his base of operations a hideout in the remote forests of the Five Finger Mountain Range, which dominates the island. At times he lived in retreat there, at others he sent his men to harass the authorities in control, either the Nationalists or the Japanese. Eventually, his troops were organized into an army numbering some 10,000 to 12,000 men. Never well armed, and consequently unable to challenge the authorities directly, they nonetheless persisted in conducting attacks upon communication lines and thus served as a continuing threat until the arrival of major Communist forces on the island in April 1950. It was during his early years as a guerrilla fighter, probably about 1928, that Feng dropped his original name and adopted Feng Pai-chii, by which he has since been known. His base in Hainan is described by the Communists today as one of the 14 “liberated areas” in which Communist bases were left when the main Red armies were forced to evacuate central China and make the Long March to the northwest (1934). However, despite the rather tenuous connections with Yenan implied by this claim, central Party control over Feng’s guerrillas in remote Hainan must have been very slight indeed.
Realizing the need to maintain contact with Feng’s operations while Party headquarters were in central China, the headquarters sent an emissary to visit Hainan in 1930. Thus, quite soon after his return from the Soviet Union in the summer of 1930, Teng Fa went to Hainan to help organize Feng’s army. Teng had been elected to the Party Central Committee in 1930 and was a logical person to send to contact Feng, because prior to his visit to the USSR he had held various posts in the Party apparatus for the Canton-Hong Kong area under which supervision of Hainan fell. As a result of this visit, in 1930 Feng organized an independent division of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, the Мао-Chu Army of central China, and for the next six years he harassed the Nationalist headquarters on the island with his guerrilla troops. During the Long March he is said to have lost touch completely with Party headquarters, and he did not re-establish contact until the spring of 1936 when the Communist capital was in north Shensi. Later in 1936 Nationalist forces arrested Feng and his wife, Wang Hui-chou, who had been a fellow guerrilla fighter in Hainan, but Feng was released upon the outbreak of the Sino- Japanese War (July 1937), and he set about immediately regrouping and recruiting for his original forces, said to number now only some 200 men. In 1938 the Nationalists recognized him as the commander of an independent unit of the People’s Anti-Japanese Self-Protection Corps, a militia-like organization, which fell under the command of their 14th Area Command in Kwangtung.
Teng was made chairman of the Hainan Military and Administrative Committee, and Feng was named vice-chairman. He held this post until July 1951 when he became chairman after Teng was transferred to Korea. In addition, Feng was made the principal Party representative in Hainan, becoming first secretary of the Hainan CCP Committee in 1950 and holding the post until about 1953. He was also: vice-chairman of the Hai-k’ou (the Ch’iung-shan port city) Military Control Commission, April 1950-February 1953; chairman of the Hainan Finance and Economics Committee, 1950- c.September 1951; commander of the Hainan Military District, 1950-February 1953. Concurrently, Feng held positions in the China mainland administrations, some of which he received several months before the conquest of Hainan in the spring of 1950. By the end of 1949 he was identified as third deputy political commissar of the Kwangtung Military District and he became a member of the Kwangtung Provincial People s Government Council, inaugurated in January 1950; in the latter he also served from December 1951 as a member of the Land Reform Committee. From 1950 he held membership on the multi-provincial administration known as the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC) until 1953 and as the Central-South Administrative Committee from 1953 until it was abolished in 1954. He also served as a member of its special south China sub-committee in charge of finance and economics. Following the example of a number of Party officials in the early fifties, as soon as a Kwangtung branch of thé Sino-Soviet Association was formed in November 1952, Feng became a member.
In the first half of 1953 Feng was transferred to Canton, the Kwangtung capital, after which he relinquished his posts in Hainan. In May of that year he was identified as a Kwangtung vice-governor and in June as director of the United Front Work Department of the CCP’s South China Sub-bureau, the organ in charge of Party affairs in Kwangtung and Kwangsi. The assignment in the United Front Department may have resulted from Feng’s rather long experience in dealing with the Li and Miao minority groups in Hainan. In 1953 he was also appointed as a member of the Kwangtung Election Committee, and when elections were held in the following year he became a Kwangtung deputy to the First NPC, which, at its inaugural session in September 1954, established the constitutional government in Peking. At the close of this same session he was elected to membership on the newly established military advisory body, the National Defense Council. A year later, in September 1955, he was among the large group of military veterans who were awarded the newly created decorations; Feng received the three top honors, the August First, the Independence and Freedom and the Liberation Orders for his military achievements during the period from 1927 to 1950. By mid-1955 Feng had advanced in the Party hierarchy to the post of deputy secretary of the Kwangtung CCP Committee, and by November of the next year he had become one of the several secretaries under First Secretary T’ao Chu. Two months before this, at the I arty’s Eighth National Congress, he was elected an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee.
Then, after more than 35 years of service in Kwangtung, he was transferred to Chekiang where in December 1963 he was elected as a vice-governor. Feng’s transfer to Chekiang may well have resulted from a decision by the Party to remove him from Kwangtung where at least among certain quarters he is probably regarded as a local hero. It is also probable that he has considerable difficulty understanding the very distinctive Chekiang dialect which, if true, would tend to isolate him all the more. In any event, it is evident that Feng’s political career had already come to an effective end in 1958 when he was so severely chastised by the Party. This was made all the more evident at the close of the first session of the Third NPC in January 1965 when he was among the very few men not re-elected to membership on the National Defense Council, thereby being stripped of his only remaining post on the national government level.
As the Communists extended their control over China, the central authorities remained very sensitive to the dangers inherent in strengthening regional factions, an element which had always played so strong a part in Chinese politics, and they were especially alert to those which might develop within the Party itself. With Feng’s long record of exercising a local command, it was perhaps not surprising that he should have found it difficult to submit to central authority once the CCP was firmly in control. Feng’s struggles with higher authority, which had apparently gone on for some time, finally became public knowledge in May 1958 at the Second Session of the Eighth CCP Congress when he and Ku Ta-ts’un were accused of fostering “localist activities.” Both Feng and Ku were then members of the provincial Party Secretariat and vice-governors of Kwangtung, as well as alternate members of the CCP Central Committee. Subsequently, an article published in an official Kwangtung CCP journal made the charges very specific. They were all the more significant for having been written by the then director of the Kwangtung Party’s Organization Department, Miss Ou Meng-chueh, who was herself also a CCP veteran and an alternate member of the national Party Central Committee. The charges against Feng went back some time, to “long ago, before the liberation,” when, though nothing was specific, it was apparent that Feng had been making himself into a local hero. His actual resistance to Peking had allegedly begun in 1952, but had first come to a head in 1956. Around the time of the Eighth Party Congress (September 1956), he and his group were accused of trying to insinuate themselves into the good graces of the Party Center in Peking in an effort to make the Kwangtung Party Committee “give in” to their wishes.
A major point of difference, the article stated, was over the land reform program. Miss Ou noted that only three per cent of the Hainan population had been classified as landlords, but she charged that Feng had argued that this figure was too high and that he had constantly clamored for enquiries into the “deviations” that had been committed during the land reform movement. As a supporter of the “localist” view, Feng had rejected the guidance of the Provincial Party
Committee as being “too left.” Further, he was said to have obstructed the work of the political cadres accompanying the Fourth Field Army troops to Flainan when these officials attempted to carry out the Party’s land reform measures. Possibly the most serious charge and certainly the most dramatic was that Feng had had a role in plotting a “miniature Hungarian incident” during the spring of 1957 in Lin-kao hsien in northern Hainan (although'it was not clear from Ou’s article that any revolt had actually taken place).
