Local Militia and State Power in Nationalist China

Throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth cen-tury, the organization of local community defense forces, or militia, was a common Chinese response to periods of civil war, popular rebel-lion, or social disorder. As such, it is hardly surprising to find an increasing level of militia mobilization leading up to and peaking in the “Nanjing decade ” (1927-1937) of Nationalist Party (Guomin-dang) rule. Precisely because the organization of militia was a recur-ring theme in modern Chinese history, the proliferation of militia in the Nationalist period raises certain questions about the significance of this phenomenon to our understanding of state-society relations in this period. In his groundbreaking study of local militarization in the mid-nineteenth century, Philip Kuhn (1970) showed how the organi-zation of militia in the face of widespread rebellions marked a devolu-tion of power from the weakened Qing state to local elites. Given such historical precedents, one might hypothesize that the widespread mobilization of militia during the Nanjing decade indicated a basic weakness in the Nationalist government’s relationship to local elites and a clue to its ultimate failure to achieve broader state-building objectives. 115 AUTHOR’S NOTE: The research and writing of this article were supported in part by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Committee for Scholarly Communications with China, and George Washington University. Earlier versions of this article were presented in panels at the 1994 meeting of the Association of Asian Studies and the 1997 meeting of the American Historical Association. The final article benefitted from the comments of the respec-tive discussants of these panels, Joseph Esherick and Mary Rankin, other panel participants, and this journal’s anonymous referees.