Guangxi

• 1. Introduction

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  Guangxi, officially the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, sits in the far south of China, pressed up against Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin. Karst peaks jut from the earth like broken teeth. Rivers carve through mountainous terrain that swallows armies and isolates communities for generations. For most of Chinese history, this was the frontier: wild, contested, and perpetually restless.

  The name itself encodes geography. "Guang" means expanse or vast, and the region has carried that designation since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. Together with its eastern twin Guangdong, Guangxi forms what the Chinese call the Two Expanses, a pair of territories that share a root name but diverged in language, culture, and fortune.

  Today Guangxi holds the largest ethnic minority population in China. The Zhuang people alone account for nearly a third of the region's population, and dozens of other ethnic groups speak languages that range across every major Chinese family and beyond. This is a place where multiple versions of Chinese, as well as Zhuang, Kam, Miao, and Vietnamese, can be heard in the same prefecture.

  How did a region on China's southern frontier become home to such extraordinary human diversity? And how did Guangxi move from a land of open revolt and banditry to an autonomous region with a strategic role in China's trade with Southeast Asia? The answers reach from the Qin dynasty to the Cultural Revolution, from the Taiping Rebellion to a General Motors joint venture.

• 2. Frontier and Name

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  In 214 BC, the Han Chinese general Zhao Tuo claimed most of southern China for Qin Shi Huang. The original inhabitants were a mixture of tribal groups the Chinese called the Baiyue, meaning the Hundred Yue. When the Qin emperor died and civil war erupted, Zhao seized the opportunity to establish his own kingdom at Panyu, called Nanyue or Southern Yue.

  Nanyue alternated between submission to and independence from the Han dynasty, expanding sinicization through a policy its rulers described as "Harmonizing and Gathering the Hundred Yue." That kingdom collapsed in 111 BC when the Han expanded southward and absorbed it.

  The name Guangxi traces a long etymological thread. During the Three Kingdoms period, Eastern Wu controlled southeastern China and administered the area. The Song dynasty later governed it as Guangnanxi, meaning West Southern Expanse, which shortened over time to Guangxi. By the Song's own time the phrase had already been used long enough that the separation of Guangxi and Guangdong as administrative units was formalized as Guǎngnán Xīlù and Guǎngnán Dŋnglù.

  The abbreviation the region uses today, the character Guì, comes not from the word for expanse but from the city of Guilin, which served as the provincial capital during both the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Western spelling shifted from Kwangsi in postal and Wade-Giles romanizations to Guangxi in 1958, and the pinyin form became the internationally recognized standard after 1986.

• 3. Revolt and Resistance

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  The Zhuang leader Nong Zhigao launched a revolt in 1052 that is still remembered by the Zhuang people today. Caught between the Song dynasty and the Jiaozhi kingdom in what is now Vietnam, Nong built an independent state that the tattooed Song general Di Qing eventually dismantled, returning Guangxi to imperial control.

  The Ming dynasty found Guangxi easier to govern by division than by unity. Officials deliberately set different local ethnic groups against one another. At the Battle of Big Rattan Gorge between the Zhuang and the Yao in 1465, a reported 20,000 people died.

  During the Ming and Qing dynasties, parts of Guangxi were ruled by the powerful Cen clan, who were of Zhuang ethnicity. Chinese emperors recognized them as tusi, a category of local hereditary ruler permitted to govern under imperial authority.

  The Qing left the region largely alone until imposing direct rule in 1726. The 19th century then brought cascading unrest. A Yao revolt in 1831 was followed by the Jintian Uprising in January 1851, the event that set the Taiping Rebellion in motion. The Da Cheng Rebellion followed in April 1854. The execution of a French missionary, St. Auguste Chapdelaine, by local Guangxi officials provoked the Second Opium War in 1858 and opened the interior to foreign interference.

  In the Sino-French War, the Guangxi Army repulsed the French from Chinese territory at the Battle of Zhennan Pass, now known as Friendship Pass, on the 23rd of March 1885. That pass sits on the border Guangxi still shares with Vietnam today.

• 4. Warlords and the New Clique

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  Guangxi seceded from the Qing Empire on the 6th of November 1911, following the Wuchang Uprising. The Qing governor Shen Bingdan initially kept his post, but a mutiny led by General Lu Rongting removed him.

  Lu's Old Guangxi clique swept through Hunan and Guangdong and resisted Yuan Shikai's attempt to restore an imperial government, a conflict called the National Protection War. Feuding with Sun Yat-sen, however, led to defeats in the Guangdong-Guangxi War of 1920 and 1921. Chen Jiongming's Cantonese forces briefly occupied the region before it dissolved into what the source describes simply as disunity and profound banditry.

  Li Zongren's Guangxi Pacification Army broke that cycle and assembled the New Guangxi clique alongside Huang Shaohong and Bai Chongxi. Successful campaigns against the warlord Wu Peifu in Hunan earned Li's forces the nicknames the Flying Army and the Army of Steel. After Sun Yat-sen's death, Li joined the Northern Expedition and helped Chiang Kai-shek establish Kuomintang control over rival warlords. Because the New Guangxi clique units were largely free of Chinese Communist Party influence, Chiang employed them in the Shanghai massacre of 1927.

  In 1929, Chen Zhaoli and Deng Xiaoping led the Baise Uprising, a failed Communist revolt within Guangxi. In 1937, Soong Mei-ling appealed for women to support the Sino-Japanese War, and the Guangxi Women's Battalion was founded in response; estimates of its size ranged from 130 students to 800.

  Guangxi did not fall during the Chinese Civil War. It joined the People's Republic in December 1949, two months after the republic's founding.

• 5. Cultural Revolution and Recovery

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  The Guangxi Massacre during the Cultural Revolution killed between 100,000 and 150,000 people in the region in 1967 and 1968. That figure places it among the most lethal episodes of violence anywhere in China during that period.

  In 1952, a section of Guangdong's coastline covering Qinzhou, what is now Hepu County, Fangchenggang, and Beihai was transferred to Guangxi. That transfer was reversed in 1955 and then restored in 1965. The result made Guangxi the only autonomous region in China that is not landlocked.

  After some heavy industry development in the 1960s and 1970s, Guangxi remained primarily a scenic destination. The economic growth of the 1990s largely bypassed the region. More recently, industrialization has accelerated and cash crops have expanded. Per capita GDP has risen as industries from Guangdong relocate to Guangxi in search of comparatively lower wages.

  During the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, Guangxi communities supplied the People's Liberation Army with food and housing. Militia members built roads, bridges, and trenches, and cared for wounded soldiers. The border geography that made Guangxi a contested frontier for two millennia made it essential logistics territory once again.

• 6. People and Language

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  Over 16 million Zhuang people live in Guangxi, making them the largest ethnic minority in China. Over 90 percent of all Zhuang in China live here, concentrated in the central and western regions and in cities including Nanning, Liuzhou, Chongzuo, Baise, Hechi, and Laibin. In the county-level city of Jingxi, a 2021 government publication reported that 99.7 percent of the population is ethnically Zhuang.

  The Zhuang folk religion centers on the worship of their ancestral god Buluotuo. According to surveys conducted in 2007 and 2009-40.48 percent of the region's population practices ancestor veneration, while 0.26 percent identifies as Christian. Among the Yao, another numerous group, a form of indigenized and conservative Taoism predominates.

  The linguistic picture is among the most complex of any region in China. In Nanning alone, three varieties of Chinese are spoken locally: Southwestern Mandarin, Yue (specifically Cantonese), and Pinghua, alongside various Zhuang languages. Across the region, speakers of Goulou Yue, Yongxun Yue, Qinlian Yue, and Guangfu Yue coexist with speakers of Guiliu Mandarin and smaller communities of southern Guizhou and Yunnan dialectal Mandarin. There are also Xiang Chinese speakers near Quanzhou county, 140,000 Min Chinese speakers, and significant populations speaking Kam, Mulam, Maonan, Hmong, Mien, Bunu, and Vietnamese.

  The Han Chinese, who form 62.48 percent of the population by the 2020 census, are concentrated along the southern coast and eastern portions of the region. At the year-end of 2021, the region's total population stood at 48.85 million.

• 7. Economy and Resources

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  Guangxi grows 85 percent of the world's star anise. That fact alone sets the region apart from every other place on earth, and the spice has acquired strategic significance: star anise is a major ingredient in oseltamivir, the antiviral medication.

  The region holds approximately one-third of all tin and manganese deposits in China, making it one of the country's key centers for nonferrous metals. In September 2007, China's Ministry of Commerce announced the discovery of 120 million tons of new bauxite reserves in the southern Youjiang area of Chongzhou, adding to already-proven reserves of approximately one billion tons.

  Liuzhou serves as the main industrial center and a major motor vehicle manufacturing hub. General Motors operates a manufacturing base there through the joint venture SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile. During the drafting of China's Five Year Plan in 2011, the local government earmarked 2.6 trillion RMB for investment in the Beibu Gulf Economic Zone.

  As the only coastal region in China with close proximity to Southeast Asia, Guangxi holds a strategic position in China's trade with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. In January 2008, trade import and export in the Beibu Gulf zone exceeded US.3 billion, a record high at that time. The Finnish Fortune 500 forest products company Stora Enso was among the major projects attracted to the zone.

  Guangxi's 2017 nominal GDP was approximately 2,039.63 billion yuan, ranking 17th in China. Its per capita GDP that year was 38,102 yuan. Because the region lacks the heavy manufacturing base of neighboring provinces, it ranks as the fourth most energy-efficient provincial-level region in China.

• 8. Karst, Rivers, and Tourism

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  Guilin sits beside the Li River among karst peaks that have made it famous across China and the world. Karst landforms, characterized by steep mountains and large caverns, cover 37.8 percent of Guangxi's total land area. The region's highest point is Kitten Mountain in the Yuecheng range, at 2,141 meters.

  The Ban Gioc-Detian waterfall straddles the border between China and Vietnam and draws Chinese tourists visiting Nanning. To the north, near the border with Guizhou, the Longsheng Rice Terraces rank among the steepest in the world. South of Guilin along the Li River, the town of Yangshuo has become a favored destination for foreign visitors.

  The Pinglu Canal was constructed to link the Xi River system to the coast, extending the network of waterways that already connected Guangxi to the Pearl River Delta. The Xi River system itself branches into the He River, the Li River, the Gui River, the Liu River, the You River, the Yong River, and a series of tributaries that together drain most of the region into the South China Sea.

  Guangxi's seaports at Beihai, Qinzhou, and Fangchenggang sit along the short Gulf of Tonkin coastline that was transferred, reversed, and restored across three decades of the mid-20th century. The Jingjiang Princes' City in Guilin, once the residence of princes during the Ming and Qing dynasties, is now open to the public, and the city served as provincial capital through both of those dynasties before Nanning took over that role.