Militarization as Personal Cultivation: Student Military Training in Guomindang China, 1928–1937

Abstract

By examining the Guomindang’s (GMD’s) on-the-ground implementation of its student military training program, this article addresses the ideological tensions and diplomatic predicaments underlying the party-state’s youth mobilization strategies. While fetishizing a regimented society, the program incorporated a heterogeneous set of tactics to both inspire and control youth martial activism. The peculiar mix of military discipline, Confucian modes of education, and liberal ideals of voluntarism and competition gave rise to multifarious experiences and sentiments that muddied the main objective of the state—to convert military training into a form of personal cultivation. This study sheds light on the gap between Chiang Kai-shek’s conception of militarization as the practice of everyday discipline and Chinese students’ embrace of military training as patriotic resistance against Japanese invasion. Ultimately, the program’s mobilizational potential was undercut by its obsession with managing the trivialities of everyday life and Nanjing’s appeasement policy toward Japan.