This chapter brings together two seemingly separate aspects of Hainan Island’s history during the Chinese Communist revolution and into the early People’s Republic. These two aspects are the anti-localism political campaigns of the 1950s through which local leadership was punished or removed for favoring local priorities over national ones, and the relatively high revolutionary participation by women in the Communist fighting forces of Hainan. This chapter uses recent Chinese and Western scholarship, as well as memoir and oral history, to examine how traditional gender roles were reinforced through the anti-localism campaigns, even during what were otherwise some of the most radical moments of the early PRC. The popular revolutionary drama Red Detachment of Women took several forms, including ballet and opera, and as a cultural artifact it stood in for the history of women fighters on Hainan from its first performances in the early 1960s. Like the anti-localism campaigns, Red Detachment of Women, as a didactic drama, reinforced patriarchal and mainland control over Hainan, and this chapter aims to illuminate some of the ways in which this happened.