Honghu () is a county-level city in the municipal region of Jingzhou, in the central south of Hubei province. The city lies on the northwest (left) bank of the Yangtze River, across from Hunan Province and Xianning, Hubei. It is named after the adjacent Hong Lake, which since ancient times has periodically flooded.
The traditional Chinese holiday, Dragon Boat Festival, celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, features boat races which are run on Hong Lake.
By means of its famous lake, Honghu City produces forty kinds of fish and an abundance of plants, such as lotus, reed and a type of black algae.
As of 2000, Honghu City had a population of 335,618 or more people.
History
Honghu is celebrated as an important supporter of the Communist side during last century's Chinese Civil War. Westerners know it for New Zealand communist Rewi Alley's relief work and Gung-ho (共合, Gonghe) co-operative movement.
Civil War
Honghu and other regions around its lake were part of an important communist stronghold called the Hunan-Western Hubei Revolutionary Base Area (, Xiang-Exi Geming Genjudi, also called the Hunan-Western Hubei Soviet, , Xiang-Exi Suweiai). The Hunan-Western Hubei Soviet was actually a collection of several isolated bases linked together by underground and guerrilla activities. The Honghu Base, the largest, was itself the object of four Encirclement Campaigns, the last of which was strategised as one stage of the broadly successful Encirclement Campaign against Hunan-Western Hubei Soviet.
The base area or soviet was under the leadership of communist general (later Field Marshal) He Long through most of its existence, and defended by his Second Army Group. Finally crushed by Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Army and various allied warlord forces, co-ordinated in his Encirclement Campaigns, the Soviet and its military force retreated westward to form the Hunan-Hubei-Sichuan-Guizhou revolutionary base area, which in October 1934 refuged the retreating troops of the Sixth Army Group. Folding the men of the Sixth into his ranks, He Long formed the Second Front Red Army which was to take its own route on the Long March.
Gung Ho
Rewi Alley carried out flood relief in Honghu 1932. Famous for the Gung Ho Cooperative movement that he founded (along with others) during the Second Sino-Japanese War (World War Two), Alley established half a dozen small-scale industrial co-operatives in Honghu under the revamped Gung Ho movement he led in the 1980s.
PRC
Market Economy in the 1950s
In 1954, Yangtze River had a huge flood that only occurred once a century, and in order to save major cities including Wuhan, Honghu was designated as the flooded area, resulting in nearly a million local residents becoming refugees after the entire county was flooded. As the flood subsided and refugees returned to begin rebuilding, another political disaster struck the county that was already devastated by the flood: on May 5, 1955, Mao Zedong personally claimed that the time was critical for collectivization, and ordered the immediate start of collectivization, which must be completed within three years.
The local communist party secretary Mr. Li Jinyu ()(1922 - October 8, 2002) was assigned to the area in 1955 and witnessed the devastation first hand. Li strongly opposed Mao's policy and openly claimed that there must be prerequisite conditions for collectivization and Honghu had not met any of them. Instead Li convinced his colleagues to adopt an economic policy that was completely against Mao's wish - a de facto market economy (for political reasons the term could not be mentioned).
This proved to be a great success: not only the county was fully recovered from the devastation within a year, the average industrial annual growth was 17.7% and average agricultural annual growth was 11.3%. In the era where most Chinese peasants were only able to eat meat once a year during the Chinese new year, the local peasantry students at all schools in Honghu county were guaranteed a meal of chicken, a meal of fish, and a meal of meat every week. However, the good times would not last long: Li and his colleagues as well as the local population would eventually pay a heavy price for going against Mao's will. Li, keenly aware of this, asked the local populace to prepare by stocking grains and other foods at their homes.