China's Hainan Island - Then and Now

Hainan province (海南省) is an island of misty mountains, coconut palms, sandy beaches, tropical rain forests, and - in recent years - a booming entrepreneurial urban economy which operates on the fringes of legality.

In imperial times Hainan was the final destination for exiled officials. Though almost as large as Taiwan, it was regarded by those on the mainland as "the end of the earth", excessively hot, as well as filled with snakes and populated by wild aborigines.

After 1949, it was still distant and obscure for most Chinese, though it was becoming an important base for the Chinese Liberation Army in defending China against America's containment policy.

Though Hainan was no longer a place for penal exile, migration was highly organized and most of those who went there had little alternative. In the 1950s, the majority were ex-soldiers and their families, or economic migrants who were settled on state farms to open up the land.

But this soon changed after the island was opened to the outside world in the early 1980s. Described by John Gittings as "China's New Frontier", Hainan was soon known throughout the country as a place where "the enterprising and the unscrupulous could prosper".

Designated a Special Economic Zone in 1986, it attracted thousands of investors and job-seekers from all over China, and in spite of a succession of financial scandals, flourished to become "China's wild southern frontier".

As Gittings wrote: "Hainan's new voluntary exiles from the mainland were soon testing, to the criminal limit and beyond, the post-Mao policy of allowing those with entrepreneurial ambitions to get rich first."

In those heady (arguably even now?) days, junior civil servants and employees from government-owned industry on the mainland may announce that they were visiting Hainan "for a holiday". But all their colleagues knew that they were really going there to check out the prospects, but without breaking their state-provided "iron rice bowls"!