Edward A. McCord

Warlords against Warlordism: The Politics of Anti-Militarism in Early Twentieth-Century China

In a recent article published in the Journal of Military History , Arthur Waldron noted that war in Chinese history has been ‘treated at best as a largely unexamined context’. One has only to look at the cursory treatment given by most textbooks to the incessant civil wars of Chinas ‘warlord’ period (usually dated from 1916 to 1926) to see the truth of this statement. In the above article, Waldron seeks to remedy some of this neglect by pointing out the important relationship in this period between war and the course of modern Chinese nationalism. Although less ambitious, this article also seeks to explore a more specific, yet also largely unexamined, aspect of this relationship, namely the emergence of anti-militarism, or more specifically anti-warlordism, as a defining theme in modern Chinese nationalism.

Local Bullies and Armed Force Entrepreneurs: Militia Leadership in Republican Hunan

A proliferation of militia and other local self-defense forces indicated the serious political and social instability of China’s Republican period. The first decade of this period saw a steady, if uneven, growth of militia activity as local communities responded both to political dislocations caused by recurring civil wars and warlord conflicts and to the increased banditry that flourished in this environment. In the mid1920s this local militarization reached a new peak, not seen since the suppression of widespread rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century, in response to the social conflict that both contributed to and was fostered by the political struggle between the Nationalist and Communist parties. The growth of militia forces led to the increasing power and influence of militia leaders in local society. In his 1927 report on the Hunan peasant movement, Mao Zedong described “local bullies and evil gentry (土 豪劣紳 tuhao lieshen)” with independent jurisdiction over local defense corps as virtual “kings of the countryside (鄉裡王 xiangli wang).” This characterization was not simply Communist propaganda; Nationalist Party sources also describe militia leaders as local “lords (諸侯 zhuhou)” because of their extensive local powers. Although the power of local militia leaders in Republican China is widely recognized, how much do we actually know about these men? What were their backgrounds? How did they rise to positions of power in their local communities? Such questions, focusing on the actual lives and activities of militia leaders, have so far received little attention. Most generalizations about militia leaders in the Republican

Cries That Shake the Earth Military Atrocities and Popular Protests in Warlord China

This article examines a rare instance in China’s warlord period when military officers were actually held accountable for military atrocities. These atrocities occurred in 1920, when retreating Northern troops pillaged and murdered their way through three Hunan counties before being forced to surrender to a Hunan army. A popular outcry immediately arose in Hunan to punish the officers for the crimes of their troops. Responding to this pressure, a Hunan military court ultimately sentenced two commanders and several other officers to death. Nonetheless, it was only the specter of possible political disorder, as protests escalated from angry press reports and petitions into actual street demonstrations by atrocity victims, that convinced Hunan’s new and relatively unstable provincial government to accede to these popular demands. The case therefore illuminates both the potential political power and limits of public opinion and popular protests in Republican China.

Ethnic Revolt, State-Building and Patriotism in Republican China: The 1937 West Hunan Miao Abolish-Military-Land Resist-Japan Uprising

This paper examines how an ethnic Miao uprising in West Hunan in 1937 became the site for the interaction of a broad range of competing local, provincial, and national interests. The target of the uprising was a tuntian system formed from confiscated Miao lands in the early nineteenth century to support a military system defending against Miao disturbances. Surviving anachronistically into the twentieth century, the military land rents of this system formed a base for warlord power on Hunans western frontier. The uprising arose opportunistically in the context of a struggle over the resources of this system between the warlord of West Hunan and a provincial governor whose provincial state-building project sought to end the regions long political autonomy. The uprising consequently drew the attention of Nationalist Party factions who saw it as an opportunity to use the uprising to undermine the provincial governor in the interest of their own centralizing state-building project. Finally, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War allowed uprising leaders to recast the uprising as a patriotic movement, seeking equality for the Miao of West Hunan by the abolition of the tuntian system and offering the mobilization of uprising forces for service at the front once this goal was achieved. In the end, the uprising functioned as a palimpsest upon which the multiple motivations and desires of its participants, in their broad social, political and personal contexts, were written and overwritten.

To change China

Julian Gewirtz’ study of the role of Western economists in China’s post-Mao economic reforms stands, in a unique way, as a marker of the historiographic shifts in howWestern scholarship has addressed the role of the West in China’s modern development. Western experts of various sorts were key figures in the original Western impact–response approach to Chinese studies. This scholarship presented them as nothing less than the most visible agents of the challenges that resulted in, and the key sources of inspiration for, adaptations that led China down the path to modernity. One of the most influential works representing this approach was Jonathan Spence’s popular study of Western advisors in China, with case studies of sixteen exemplary figures spanning 350 years from the early seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. By the 1980s, though, a more critical evaluation of the impact– response paradigm emerged, primarily represented by Paul Cohen’s challenge to create a more “China-centered” history of China. Western scholars were quick to respond, largely abandoning the study of China’s foreign relations, including the influence of Western individuals or institutions, in favor of more internally focused studies of China’s historical development. It should perhaps come as no surprise that this shift in approach largely tracked changes in China’s international situation. Many China observers no doubt perceived China’s Cold War isolation (at least toward the West) in the Mao era as the end of the hopes of generations of Western advisors, as described by Spence, to “change China” in their own image. Spence himself cited China’s H-bomb test in 1967 as the end of a “cycle” of influence by foreign advisors, signifying that China “had graduated into the modern world.” Indeed, he argued that Chinese advisors from this point on competed in the world with those from the West, “seeking to prove the validity of a Chinese world view through the sophistication of Chinese expertise.” This sense that the Chinese had finally emerged as the masters of their own destiny clearly paved the way for greater cognizance of how Western-centered histories of China may have overlooked the ways in which the Chinese themselves had been agents in their own development. There is considerable irony, however, in the way in which shifts in scholarly approaches were also at times anachronistically delayed responses to China’s changing interactions with the West. Thus, Cohen’s 1984 call for a more China-centered history followed in the wake of a new policy, initiated by Deng Xiaoping, of again “opening up” China to the world. There is some additional irony in the way in which new access to Chinese materials fostered by this opening facilitated the new interest in “China-centered” research. But those of us who benefited from these research opportunities should not have been blind to the linguistic

Synarchy and the Chinese People A Plea for Internationalization in Warlord China

In the wake of a major mutiny by warlord forces in 1921 that left much of the Yangzi port city of Yichang in ruins, a group of Chinese citizens appealed to the foreign diplomatic community to turn the city into a foreign concession under foreign protection. In a statement that seems shocking in the context of the burgeoning anti-imperialist sentiment that followed the May 4th incident of 1919, the petitioners concluded that if their wish was granted, “they would make no complaint, even if we become slaves without nationality.” This incident suggests that in at least some cases many Chinese did not hesitate to make common cause with the foreigners in their midst against a mutual threat. The article seeks to retrofit John King Fairbank’s concept of synarchy to explain how the Chinese people may have both perceived and negotiated the uneven and interpenetrated power relations of the central government, warlord authorities, and foreign powers in the Republican era.

Militia Training and State Control in Republican Hu’nan

AbstractThis study of Hunan province during China’s Nanjing decade (1927-1937) shows how militia training could play a key role in the extension of state control both over local militia and through militia into local society. Provincial authorities in Hunan used an argument for the need to increase the efficacy of militia through more rigorous military training to justify an activist intervention in local militia organizations. This training goal then provided a means of extending increased state control over militia as provincial personnel were dispatched to “supervise” local militia training, as local militia leaders were evaluated on the basis of their ability to provide this training, and as training content was expanded to include political indoctrination as well as military skills. Meanwhile the government strengthened ties with local militia officers through extended training programs in the provincial capital or in army units. While many of these efforts focused on standing militia forces and their officers, training programs were also instituted for the mass membership of lower-level “volunteer corps.” More than just political indoctrination, the regimentation instilled by regular training programs also worked to increase the state’s control over the lives of its citizens.

A Review of “The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb”: Lorge, Peter A., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 200 pp.,

Peter Lorge, a senior lecturer of history at Vanderbilt University, is a member of an emerging group of scholars who have turned Chinese military history into a vibrant and productive field of research. Building on his previous work on China, Lorge’s The Asian Military Revolution is both ambitious in its scope—covering military and political developments in East, Southeast, and South Asia from the twelfth to the nineteenth century—and provocative in its thesis. Lorge argues that along with gunpowder and guns, early modern warfare itself was invented in China in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, generating a military revolution that spread throughout Asia long before Europe’s own and better-known gunpowder-based military revolution occurred in the sixteenth century. Although the Chinese invention of gunpowder is well known, the conventional narrative credits the West with an effective weaponization of gunpowder, which is then seen to have had a transformative effect on Western states and on the entire world order. In this narrative, Western military dominance is used to support a broader assumption of Western cultural and technological superiority. Lorge destabilizes this narrative by showing the widespread adaptation of gunpowder in Asia to a wide range of military uses up to and including true guns prior to (and most likely influencing) their development in Europe. The arrival of the West in Asia did not, then, introduce guns into technologically backward, let alone technologically resistant, Asian societies. Indeed, Lorge argues that this prior experience with gunpowder and guns actually made it easier for Asian states and societies to incorporate Western guns into their own arsenals. It was only in the eighteenth century that technological advances in Western weaponry, which could not be so easily replicated by preexisting Asian industrial bases, began to give Western armies and navies their competitive edge. Nonetheless, Asian states remained alert to the advantages of these weapons. Whereas smaller states, such as Vietnam, made rational decisions to acquire these advanced weapons directly from Western sources, China and Japan quickly adapted their own industrial bases to produce them. Without discounting the second “military revolution” brought about by Western technological advances in weaponry, by demolishing the myth of Asian military backwardness and resistance to technological change, Lorge argues that weapons alone do not explain the successful extension of Western political dominance over much of Asia in the modern era. Lorge’s use of the term military revolution to describe the transformation of warfare that accompanied the development of gunpowder weapons in Asia is a deliberate attempt to engage the military revolution debate in European history. The advocates of this concept have argued that the requirements of effective gun warfare helped to produce the bureaucratic apparatus that ultimately provided the foundation for the modern European state. The Asian case as described by Lorge, however, argues for a relationship between technological and state development in the opposite direction. In his view, the prior development of appropriate political structures (most notably centralized bureaucracy) within Asian societies contributed to the capacity to make use of new gunpowderbased military technology. In the sense that warfare across Asia was radically and permanently transformed by the introduction of gunpowder and guns, Lorge argues that there was still a military revolution. Adaptations to this new technology also played a significant role in political outcomes (such as the Mughal conquest of India). Nonetheless, they did not, as claimed for the European case, lead to a broader transformation of the state structures. By challenging the idea that technological developments must of necessity lead to institutional changes, Lorge suggests that the Asian case should also raise questions about these more extensive claims for a European military revolution. In the end, some readers might still question Lorge’s use of the concept of a military “revolution” in the Asian case. Lorge narrates a fairly long and continuous process of technological adaptation and change involving the coordination of a range of weapons, of which gunpowder weapons were only one part. Evolutionary transformation seems a more accurate, if less powerful, label for the process he describes. This terminological quibble, though, should not obscure the significance and strength of the book’s main arguments. The Asian Military Revolution should be of interest to a wide audience. Both Asian and military historians will want to consider how this book challenges or changes their own narratives, and many may want to consider using the book as a textbook in their courses. At the same time, the book’s provocative thesis and comprehensive perspective should attract a broad popular audience.

72.00, ISBN 978-0-5218-4682-0 Publication Date: August 2008

concrete benefit of landed or commercial wealth, under the right conditions, military power could be a trump card in competition with other elite resources. Thus, in the context of nineteenth-century rebellions, militia leadership played an important role in the formation and maintenance of elite power in local Chinese society (Kuhn, 1970; Meskill, 1979; McCord, 1990). Likewise, the politicization of the military and the militarization of politics, in the context of late Qing and early Republic revolutionary struggles and civil wars, led to the political dominance of military elites at national and provincial levels (that is, the emergence of warlordism) (McCord, 1993). The civil warfare that accompanied the extension of Guomindang power in the 1920s and 1930s and the subsequent war with Japan solidified the political importance and status of military men in China. Thus, over the course of the late imperial and Republican periods, military