State, Local Society, and Popular Interaction in Grassroots Conscription under the Nationalist Government

The penetration of the Nationalist Government’s conscription system into the countryside during the War of Resistance against Japan provides a crucial lens through which to examine state – society relations in wartime China. Counties and townships constituted the starting points of recruitment, while villages were its fundamental units. Except for frontier regions and minority areas where recruitment was hampered by special circumstances, ordinary counties in Nationalist-controlled territory – such as Linli in Hunan Province – displayed a hybrid pattern in which state power infiltrated the localities even as village society exercised considerable autonomy. The discretionary space and flexibility embedded in recruitment both constrained the downward reach of state authority and reflected the Nationalist Government’s pragmatic recognition of local realities and policy adaptation, thereby achieving a measure of balance among the interests involved. In its mobilization strategy, the regime combined patriotic Resistance against Japan rhetoric with rural ethical norms and initially attained some success. Yet because guarantees for soldiers’ relatives were not honored, conscripts – acting out of survival rationality – turned to legitimate resistance through draft-evasion lawsuits and other practices, laying bare deep-seated tensions between the mobilization apparatus and rural society. The Linli experience thus highlights not only the limits of the Nationalist Government’s capacity to embed itself in rural China, but also the way in which popular survival ethics continuously eroded state mobilization as it filtered downward, revealing the complex dilemmas of wartime state-building and rural social integration

Frontier · Grassroots · Mobilization · Nationalism · Resistance (ecology · Rhetoric · Rural area · State (computer science · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies