Local Militia and State Power in Nationalist China

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, the organization of local community defense forces, or militia, was a common Chinese response to periods of civil war, popular rebellion, or social disorder. As such, it is hardly surprising to find an increasing level of militia mobilization leading up to and peaking in the (1927-1937) of Nationalist Party (Guomindang) rule. Precisely because the organization of militia was a recurring theme in modem 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 organization of militia in the face of widespread rebellions marked a devolution 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.